


Genus Panthera

by harcourt



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Captivity, Gen, Human Experimentation, I wrote this for the kinkmeme, Past Torture, Shapeshifting, h/c, maybe Clint/Tony, refferences to child abuse, what amounts to human trafficking, what amounts to slavery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-09
Updated: 2017-08-09
Packaged: 2017-11-13 21:23:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 29
Words: 78,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/507850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/harcourt/pseuds/harcourt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For <a href="http://avengerkink.livejournal.com/9218.html?thread=19650562#t19650562">this prompt</a> from the kink meme, which goes a little something like this:</p><p>
  <i>Rarely, a person is born with the ability to shapeshift into animal forms, with the form(s) they can take determined by what animals they grew up with and had emotional bonds with and understanding of. Therefore, most shapeshifters take the forms of domestic animals like cats and dogs.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>Once a shapeshifter is identified, they soon disappear, be it to labs for research or to billionaires as exotic collectibles. Especially if the form they can take is in any way unusual.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>And Clint grew up in a circus.</i>
</p><p>In which Tony discovers that Clint is sometimes a tiger with a past. Or rather, that Clint is sometimes a tiger, and also has a past.</p><p>It comes knocking.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Because of the way I'm writing this--as one long run-on file, undivided into chapters--the length of chapters-as-posted might be somewhat uneven.

The first thing Tony thinks is that this is _awesome_. And okay, Clint's having a little transformed-right-out-of-my-pants Bruce issue going on, but still. "I've heard of you people," Tony tells him, grinning. It's not that he's not shocked, it's just that he's had a near death experience and also his brain catches up quickly.

Also, he's kind of impressed, and it's not easy to impress Tony Stark. It's like a little circle of something. Amazingness, maybe. He feels a little giddy with it and that's helping a lot with the surprise. 

"Barton," he says, breathy with excitement, his eyes wide. He's probably coming off a little manic, "Barton, this could be amazing for science."

"My science, I mean, specifically," he adds, when the tiger draws back, a hilarious little scoot that reminds Tony of armpit dogs, maybe. Like a small, threatened animal. Its ears go back. 

_His_ ears. _Clint's._

So cool.

And then Clint whirls and bounds away in a streak of orange and white and black, his tail flicking as the whole fucking half ton of him disappears over the pile of rubble that had been a rickety tower. Communications maybe. He and Barton had taken it out just before the robot-whatever-thing had appeared and re-done their job for them and then tried to kill them before Clint had literally bitten it's head off.

"Barton?" Tony yells, because he'd sort of half-expected Clint to appear Lion King-like on top of the rubble to pose dramatically and maybe be smug and show off a bit before fucking changing back so he could put his pants back on. 

It's what Tony would have done.

"Cap?" he says, after he's stood there for a long while with no sign of Clint re-appearing, "I think I lost Hawkeye."

" _What_?" It's kind of a shriek. Steve sounds really alarmed.

"Oh. No. Not that way. He's. Um. I think he's run away."


	2. Chapter 2

Clint's a trouble maker, but not really a dramatic running-away-from-home type of trouble maker. Tony figures he'll come back when he gets hungry. He has nothing with him, after all. No clothing, no money, no weapons. How far could he possibly get?

"Wait a second," he says, "How the fuck is he going to _get_ back? He'll either have to wander New York City butt ass naked or as a giant fucking tiger. Either way, he's going to end up in trouble with someone." He wonders if they can ask Fury for a team to look for a nude Clint Barton, or a tiger, either-or. Wonders what Fury will say.

It kind of makes him want to give it a shot.

Steve glares at him, though, so he doesn't.

\-----

Clint shows back up, actually, in much better shape than Tony had predicted, dressed in worn jeans and sneakers and a hooded sweatshirt. Looking like anyone off the street, and combined with the fact that he tries to sneak into the tower and is only caught because of JARVIS, Tony comes to an ugly conclusion.

"You never meant to come back," he yells at Clint, "Or you did, but to get your stuff and then to fuck on out of here, never to be seen again, without a word to anyone."

Clint doesn't answer. Clint looks fucking pissed. 

"What happened?" Steve asks, gentle. Being a good leader. It makes Tony want to whack him upside the head.

"You know what _happened_ ," Clint snaps, like it's their fault he has the option of walking on four feet instead of two.

"Where did you get those clothes?" Tony asks, because _really_. Clint gives him a vile look. "And how did you get all the way back here without someone shooting you? And--"

Clint looks furious. He has assassin ways, Tony understands. It's not like he's really _prying_. These are all reasonable questions. "Wait," he says, "wait. You do other animals, too, don't you? What else can you do? A giraffe? Elephant? Something domestic and non-threatening?" It's a bit too much like he thinks Clint's going to whip out balloon animals. He stops himself. "Why the fuck did you bail on me, Barton?"

Steve says, "It was a mission, Clint," and yes, thank you, Steve. Tony makes a 'see?' gesture at Clint because yes. Captain America agrees with him.

Clint says, "Let me get my stuff," and it looks like he means it to sound pissy and intimidating, but it comes out small. Tony almost expects him to scuff his toe on the floor or something. For a second he thinks Clint might be embarrassed, but it's not really Clint's thing. Or, it could be, but not about the ability to transform into a fucking tiger. 

That's something Clint would brag and brag and brag about. 

Steve must notice something's off too, because he takes a step towards Clint and Clint backs up so fast he slams into the wall. "Let me get my stuff," he says, "Cap. Please just let me get my stuff."

"What the hell is going on, Clint?" Steve sounds like Clint's freaky behavior is freaking him out a bit, too. It says something about Steve that he's more focused on Clint's distress than on the fact that they just discovered he's also a six hundred pound jungle cat, but Tony's not sure if that something is endearing or obnoxious. 

Clint's pissed asshole face is gone. He looks frantic and desperate. He shoots Tony a look and it's some mix of scared-to-death and go-to-hell-Tony.

It's a bit hurtful.

"Was it something I said?" Tony wonders, more genuinely than it comes out sounding, because it comes out sounding like he's an asshole. He gestures for them to dismiss it, waving his hand in the air as if to clear it.

Steve says, in his _be reasonable_ voice, "This isn't a new thing, Clint. In the war, when Bucky was taken prisoner, we met soldiers Hydra had in the same facility. Shifters." He moves to put a hand on Clint's shoulder, but Clint bolts, ducking sideways, making for the stairs.

"JARVIS!" Tony yells, and the doors ping a lock down warning and slam shut. Clint skids on the tile coming to a halt, landing hard on his hip. 

"No. No!" He's up already, hands tearing at the near seamless join of wall and door, in what looks like full blown panic. Steve goes to catch him before he can completely flip out, and _causes_ the flip out, then has to pin Clint before he can hurt them or himself.

Tony's about to roll his eyes at it, when Clint gasps, "Please, Cap. Not back to the labs."

\----

Clint's files say that after running away to the circus, then running away _from_ the circus, Clint lived on the street, no permanent address, taking shelter where he could. Say that Fury recruited him after he'd fallen into a life of desperate crime, utterly wasting his perfect shot.

Clint's files aren't exactly correct. 

_During_ the circus, Clint wakes up one day unable to get up, because he's no longer bipedal. He wakes up with four feet and a tail and eyes that see in the dark and the ability to spring higher than his brother Barney is tall. It makes sense, later, because later he learns that shifters learn the shapes they'll manifest when they're young and he spent _days_ shoveling tiger shit each week. Assisted the act, playing up the drama of a small boy pitted against vicious beasts.

Vicious beasts he watered and mucked and who lowed greetings at him when he came into the tiger barn to do his chores in the mornings or to pat them in the evenings.

The circus has other animals, and he's spent time handling several of them, but he doesn't learn what else he's imprinted until much later, because soon after that morning where he wakes up feline, Barney gets into trouble on one of his side jobs.

He sells Clint to pay the debt he incurs.

\----

Tony waffles between being offended that Clint would think they'd betray him with guilt at his own words. _Amazing for science_ , fuck. Cap hadn't exactly made it better, bringing up the Hydra base where Bucky was taken prisoner and experimented on. 

"Back to what lab?" Steve's asking, and now Tony does roll his eyes. 

"Barton, no one's sending you anywhere. You're a freak, but you're our freak," he pauses. Reconsiders his words. "I won't do anything to you, okay? I was. It was a joke. I didn't know. No lab, I promise. You can _blow up_ my lab if it'll make you feel better." His lab is pretty blast proof. It would be okay, if Clint wanted to give it a shot. Or maybe it's disingenuous to offer destruction of a mostly indestructible lab. Clint looks at him, and probably takes his consideration the wrong way.

He's slouched on the floor, his back to the closed door. He says, "You locked me in," and it's accusing, but also a little wobbly. 

Steve says, "Only to keep you from running off." He's on the floor, too. Across from Clint, cross-legged and out of arm's reach, giving Clint space. Tony thinks if he was Clint and this worried about what they'd do, he'd just transform and eat them. He doesn't suggest it. Steve would probably be okay, but Tony Stark is soft--by tiger standards--and probably tastes delicious. He does wonder that it hasn't occurred to Clint, though, because Clint isn't a guy who usually needs attack options pointed out to him.

"Yeah, I bet," Clint spits, but that's as far as his hostility goes. He seems somehow deflated, like trying to secretly skip out on them's taken a lot out of him. Like wrestling around with Cap took the last bit of fight he had.

"You want to go?" Steve asks, and Clint perks up in interest, a little. He looks suspicious, though. Like he thinks Cap might be the sort of guy to get his hopes up, then pull the rug out from under him. All this time, apparently, Clint's been holding on to the belief that they might all be assholes. Tony's kind of offended. And hurt. And sort of really sad for him. 

He says, "JARVIS, open the door please," and is sort of afraid Clint _will_ bolt, all scared and fucked up and on his own out there. Clint straightens as the door moves against his back, sliding open. Watches it, tense and wary. 

"We won't stop you," Steve says, nodding at the re-established escape route. "I'll even help you pack, if that's what you want. But _please_ , Clint. Tell me what the hell is going on."

\----

For awhile, Clint is an amusement. He learns he can change at will, and then he learns to change on command. He learns shifters are rare, and mostly kids imprint on their pets and become hamsters and cats and dogs. That occasionally someone's parents will work in an oceanarium or something and they'll learn to be something cool like a dolphin. 

Or they'll be orphans who run away to the circus, befriend the big cat trainer and imprint on the tigers.

He learns that _exotics_ are worth a lot, in certain circles, and for a while he knows his monetary worth down to the dollar. 

And then because he's young, and the tiger is so much stronger than his own form, and he can't really control two hundred pounds of muscle--he's not so big then as he gets, later, him _or_ the tiger--when two seconds ago he was barely ninety pounds of skinny, he dislocates his keeper's knee just by accidentally bouncing into him.

They keep him for another month, and then he's packed up and shipped away, replaced by someone who can transform into something pretty and harmless. A deer or an an antelope or something.

He doesn't know how long he spends as a lab animal, but when he gets out, he's taller, bigger, stronger. He knows it because when he runs into Barney again, Barney isn't so much bigger than him anymore.

And because he can't kill his own brother, he runs. 

\---

Clint doesn't run. He just hunches over, and puts his head in his hands, and Steve scoots over without unfolding. It's a really undignified motion for Captain America. He says, "Clint?" and puts a hand on his shoulder and Clint just sits and. And _shakes_ , what the hell?

Tony says, "Who locked you up, Clint?" and he has seriously never been this pissed in his life. Or maybe he has. It's hard to tell, when every day brings new shit to be pissed at. He should develop some kind of scoring system. A scale of one to my-teammate-and-friend-was-tortured-in-a-lab-for-what-was-apparently-years-and-years.

Steve folds Clint up in his arms, because Steve is apparently everybody's big brother. Or rather, everybody's big brother who over-identifies with anyone who was ever small and hurt, even if they're now one of the world's deadliest assassins.

Clint says, small voiced, "You'll let me leave?" like he doesn't believe his luck could be so good.

"If you want. But don't. We're not going to let anything happen to you. And we're definitely not going to _do_ anything to you."

Clint doesn't leave, but Tony thinks it's probably because Steve looks like a kicked dog about it. Like he's failed Clint by having been frozen in ice during those years and not being available to rescue him, no matter than it would be more than another decade before they even met.


	3. Chapter 3

Bruce takes offense and Tony feels like someone is on his side again, since Steve has solidly bailed to Clint's side of trauma and woe. Bruce says, "Seriously? You thought Tony might _experiment on you?_ " he looks at Tony and stops. Changes it to, "You really thought we'd _let him_?" And okay. Ow.

Clint's hands shake. He looks like doesn't know whether to lie to appease Bruce, or admit that yes, he is that stupid. Bruce tempers his tone.

"Clint. I've _been_ an experiment. I would _never_ do that to you, or let anyone else if it was at all within my power." 

Tony's been an experiment, too, but he was mostly doing it to himself even if the necessity had been externally motivated. He keeps his mouth shut and Steve, willing guinea pig of Howard Stark, does too. Natasha should come and tell them all a thing or two about growing up a prisoner, possibly even including experimentation, Tony isn't sure. Or maybe she could just kick Clint's ass. He gets his phone out to text her an update.

He's typing, _Did you know Clint is a giant tiger?_ when something occurs to him. "How the hell did you not rip the hell out of your clothes? And can you teach Bruce that trick?"

Clint looks up from where he's sitting. They've moved into the kitchen because it's the place where they all feel the most like normal people. He looks like he's thinking and it takes him a lot longer than it takes Tony, usually, and then he closes his eyes. He's reached a decision and is scraping up the guts to follow through on it, and considering his levels of cajones about this tiger thing seems to hover around the _cut and secretly run off into the night_ mark, Tony's willing to wait it out.

"Alright," Clint says, looking like he's going to his death. And then his clothes collapse and a small copper animal wriggles out of them and drops to the floor. Curls it's bushy tail over it's feet and looks up at them with trembling whiskers. 

"Oh my god, you're fucking adorable," Tony says, but then he's talking to a tiger. And then to a nude Clint Barton. "And now, not so much. No offense."

"Change small, exit clothing, change big," Clint says. 

"It's funny," Tony says, "That you remembered that step, when your intention was to bail out on me in the middle of a forest."

"It was a wood," Bruce says, "at most."

Clint gets his pants back on. Considers them for a long time before saying, "I can't actually change if there's constriction. You can choke yourself if the fabric doesn't give." There's something dark in it that Tony doesn't want to think about. 

He says, "So you foxed your way home instead of whatever it is that Tiggers do best?"

"Not all the way to the city. There was a safehouse. Or. A bolthole, really. I was only naked and rooting around a civilian residence for maybe half a minute. To open the hidey key thing."

SHIELD securing it's safe houses using the super modern technology of hide-a-key is too much for Tony. He breaks from the conversation to text Natasha, _Also, he's a fox._

"I'm picturing your foxy self waiting for traffic lights and shit," he tells Clint. Teamed up with Thor's rugged innocence, they could be a PR goldmine. It's probably too soon to make a joke about that, though, because Clint still looks like he wants to throw up in terror. 

Natasha texts back, _Are you drunk and embarrassing yourself?_

 _I am a picture of dignity. I mean a real fox. You have to come home RIGHT NOW_. He even takes the trouble to make the caps, because seriously.

\----

"Oh my god," Natasha says, when she sees the proof, and seems to forget that the little fox is actually still Clint. She scratches his ears, and Clint settles down a bit, maybe finally convinced that they're not going to let anyone vivisect him. That anyone who tries will have to go through Natasha and her cute overload moment. 

She kisses the fox's nose. Clint sneezes. It's adorable as fuck. 

"Tiger!" Tony says, "Tiger!" Showing Clint off is almost as exciting as discovering Clint's shifting ability in the first place, but Clint seems a bit uneasy at the order. He hesitates before he changes, his ears swiveling suspiciously, and then Natasha is nose to nose with a giant striped cat. She looks like she thinks it's the coolest thing ever, and now that Bruce is out of Tony's corner, it's nice to have her, because Natasha is worth like two of Bruce in a household argument.

"Oh my god, Clint," she breathes, and grabs his head in both hands, burying her fingers in the longer fur at the sides of his face and pulls his massive head down so she can rub her cheek against the top of it. It's so unfair.

"Women are just going to turn into little girls all over him from now on, aren't they?" Tony says, as Clint butts his head against Natasha's before carefully lowering himself to his belly, laying his head in her lap. She looks totally impressed, then, when Clint shuffles closer, puts her arms around his neck. She looks tiny in comparison.

She _looks_ heartbroken. "No one will hurt you because of this, Clint," she says, giving him a squeeze, "Never again." Clint leans into her, rumbling, and she smiles. Clint is close to half a ton of muscle and claw and tooth, but it's clearly Natasha's protective hug that finally convinces him that he's safe.

He stays a tiger and sleeps tucked as small as he can make himself on her bed. Tony knows because Natasha texts him in the middle of the night, _I am like a fairy tale princess, guarded by a tiger as I sleep in my palace_. He can tell she's thrilled to death.

 _Technically, it's my palace_ , Tony texts back from his lab, just because.


	4. Chapter 4

Clint's more at ease showing Thor. Maybe because Thor's not from earth and has no interest in science and therefore in experimentation, the big lug. Or maybe because he figures Thor's seen weirder shit on his Prince of Asgard dimention-hopping adventures. In any case, Thor claps him on the shoulder in solidarity when Clint nervously explains.

"I would be honoured if you would show me," he says, in that whisper-boom that no one can replicate. Tony knows, because they've all tried to construct a fair Thor impression, and they've all failed. 

At first, Thor's gentle, awkwardly patting Clint's massive striped head as if he isn't sure if it's an appropriate gesture, but pretty soon they're wrestling around, Clint careful of his claws as he wraps his fore legs around Thor and kicks with his hind--the feline gutting manouvre--before springing away, to dart behind Steve, hiding there like the world's biggest neurotic housecat, whisking his tail back and forth and emitting low, growly yowls.

It isn't until they nearly overturn the dining table and slide into the kitchen appliances and Tony says, "You don't want to take this outside, kids? Or at least downstairs?" that Clint remembers he's scared of shifting around them. He slinks away and slinks back human and dressed defensively in jeans and hooded sweater. He's even pulled his boots on. Tony feels like an asshole even without Natasha's glaring.

Steve says, without looking up from his newspaper--which Tony isn't even getting started on. Again--"You're fine, Clint." Like he thinks that Clint's not sure they won't retract their acceptance if he destroys too much furniture.

And Steve might be right, because Clint grins sheepishly. Says, "Sorry. In the lab it was. You had to be careful of stuff."

Steve nods. Says. "It's okay," but Clint stays human the rest of the day.

\----

The _next_ day, though, he patters into Tony's lab--and really, Clint's skirted away from coming there since Tony found out about the shifting, so it's a bit surprising--fox-shaped, bouncing on his little feet and jingling.

He has a big ass bow around his neck and a cat bell. Tony rolls his eyes. "Are you letting Natasha do this to you, or are you in on it?" he asks, nodding at him. Clint cocks his head innocently and lets one ear droop a little. "Seriously?" Tony asks, but picks him up and puts him on the desk.

"Don't chew on anything," he says, as he sets him down and Clint makes a little snorting noise that manages to be condescending and insulted at the same time. He makes himself comfortable in a pile of papers, curling himself into a furry donut and laying his tail over his nose. Tony looks at him and says, "That could be so socially awkward and I don't know why it's not."

Clint huffs at him and goes to sleep. 

On his desk. In the lab. Huh.

Time slides away when Tony's working, so it doesn't feel like that long, but he's halfway through updating the suit's head-up displays when Clint gets up and then starts fussing, scratching at the ridiculous ribbon, making the bell jingle like mad. 

Tony says, "Hush. Serves you right," but Clint makes sharp little barking noises and pads across the desk to put himself in Tony's way. Tony pushes him aside. "Barton," he says, impatiently. Clint comes back, and lays himself across the keyboard. He's shivering a little, and Tony's not sure what that's about, then remembers.

"Okay, okay. I got it. Fashion disaster off," he says, and pulls the ribbon loose. Clint uses him as a step down, hopping to his lap, then to the floor, and then there's a naked assassin under his desk, and.

"My reputation means nothing to you, does it?" he asks, eyeing Clint, who laughs in shaky relief. "What happened?" He has a spare shirt around, and he goes to get it. Tosses it at Clint, but when Clint pulls it on it only makes his pantslessness more obvious.

"Can't stay changed that long." Clint's breathing a little hard. "It starts to hurt. Like if you overwork a muscle--" Clint pauses like he thinks Tony has no reference for exercize and might need a different comparison.

"Thanks, Barton. Way to be patronizing. And I haven't even mentioned that you're dressed like a cartoon character."

Clint looks down at himself and self consciously tugs the shirt hem lower. "I thought I could hold the shape longer. Guess I'm out of practice. Thanks for getting that off me," he says, and Tony looks over at the ribbon. "I could have cut my head off."

"No problem. Keep humoring Natasha and you might still," he says, tying the ribbon into a big loop and dropping it over Clint's head. "Now get your naked ass out from under my desk."

He watches Clint try to figure out a dignified way of doing that, and wonders if this is some kind of fucked up test, Clint spending the day sleeping on his desk in the lab and then offering up a major vulnerability.

"And I want that shirt back," he says.

\----

"The tiger, I understand," Steve says, later, playing checkers against Clint because it's like neither of them understand what _entertainment system_ means, "But how did you learn the fox?"

"Canine show. They had poodles, too," Clint says with a grin and captures a bunch of Steve's pieces, "The foxes double featured as part of this little petting zoo thing. I liked to hang out there because there'd be kids my age. They'd be really impressed at my fox taming skills." He stacks the pieces off to the side, looks up, "I'd pretend I wasn't a carnie. Like I was just this talented, animal whisperer town kid."

Steve takes his turn and Tony would think he was letting Clint win, except he knows Clint is a cheater and Steve sucks at board games. "You do anything else?"

Clint frowns at the board. Lifts a shoulder in an awkward shrug, uncomfortable the way he always is when they ask more about the shifting. He says, "What happened to the shifters Bucky met?" he sounds nervous about asking, but Steve just frowns a bit.

"After we got there, or did you mean what did Hydra want with them? We got them out with the other prisoners. They were ours, Clint. Soldiers." Now it's Steve who shrugs. "What Hydra wanted, who knows? Why did they want _Bucky_? Maybe the shifters were just unlucky, too."

Clint considers that, eyes going over the board. He starts a move, hopping the tattered remains of Steve's forces. "I can do a lion," he says, without looking up, "we had one in the big cat show. Audience likes them. The tiger's more fun to shift, though, so why bother." He collects Steve's pieces, "And the petting zoo had a hawk or eagle thing. I don't really know where the line between those is. Hawk. Eagle." He shrugs and starts collecting Steve's fallen, "I can shift him, but flyings hard and hopping around isn't that cool."

Steve surveys the massacre that is his side of the board and doesn't even bother trying to retaliate. Just scoops up the captured pieces and starts resetting the board. "Can I see?"

There's no answer. Clint resets his own side of the board, then sits back and shakes his head. He looks uncertain as hell, and for once it's Steve who's the asshole. Clint says, "You know anything about falconry, or whatever it's called?"

"No." 

Clint drops his hands into his lap and looks down at them, "Or. Or falconry gear."

"Saw a show once?" Steve offers, "When I was a kid. They had big owls, too. I got to feed one a mouse."

Clint says, "They have these--" he gestures, like he's trying to describe it with his hands. "I'm not really the shifts, you know? I'm still me. I just. I like fucking around with Nat and Thor, but I'm still a--a person."

"I know that."

Clint's hands move a little restlessly. He swallows. "They kept me hooded in that shape. Like how they do with the real birds. I don't know what for. They knew I wasn't. I didn't know what I was supposed to do. With the jesses I couldn't change back. And it. I just." 

Steve reaches across the board to grab his arm. Says, "Clint. You don't have to."

"Okay," Clint says, small and relieved. And a few seconds later he's a tiger, leaning up against Steve, the way he does with Nat, not playing, but giant and deadly and so grateful it hurts Tony to see it. 

Clint could have learned to fly, and someone had ruined it, had abused the joy of it right out of him.

Tony would go pat his ears, but Cap's already doing it.


	5. Chapter 5

New Yorkers aren't exactly experts on wild animals, and Clint doesn't exactly look like a picture book fox, the copper of his coat tending tawny and fading to tan and gray and white, which is probably why Thor and Natasha get away with taking fox-Clint to the park for so long, ridiculous fucking ribbon around his neck again. 

"I can't tell if they do that to fuck with me or not," Tony says to Bruce, watching Natasha pack a big ass handbag with emergency clothes and sandwiches.

"Want me to get you a frisbee?" Bruce asks Clint, only half kidding. 

"He's tiny! And you want to bean him with a plastic disc? You'll take his head right off!" Tony imagines the same scenario with the tiger. It would be too cool, but also harder to slip past animal control. Natasha grins and holds up a ping-pong ball. Pink with white stars. Tony's pretty sure they're doing this intentionally.

And they keep doing it right up until Clint nearly gets mauled by someone's poorly socialized labrador.

"I thought they were supposed to be friendly?" Bruce asks, when Natasha and Thor storm back home and release a bedraggled Clint from the giant handbag.

"Maybe it could smell the wretched stink of your lies," Tony says, "You _know_ you're just doing this to be that hot couple at the park with the adorable dog. Your hunger for social approval is pathetic and now you nearly got Clint killed." 

"That dog is a hazard," Natasha fumes, "It should be reported."

"And what are you going to say? That their labrador retriever attacked your illegal wild animal pet that is actually your secret agent assassin shapeshifter best friend?"

Steve gets the ribbon--frayed and grungy now--off Clint's neck and he transforms on the couch and shimmies into the jeans Natasha pulls out of the bag and throws to him. All this shifting around the tower is making him disturbingly comfortable with public nudity and Tony's sure it's only a matter of time before he forgets himself and accidentally engages in _public_ public nudity, instead of just-them public nudity.

"Are you okay?" Steve asks him, and Clint looks back with big eyes.

"Those things are so much fucking bigger than I remembered."

\----

The park thing doesn't just die a quiet death, though, because Clint pads into the lab in the early hours of the morning, human and clothed, and says, quietly, "Hey."

"Not catering to Natasha's 'I am a princess tiger' fairytale day dream thing anymore?" Tony asks, too busy choosing a screwdriver to look up. Clint snorts a laugh.

"She likes them. The animals, I mean. It's nice." He sounds embarrassed, and he should, because he's been ridiculous, but especially he's been ridiculous with Natasha and Thor. Clint rubs the back of his head self consciously. Says, "We went down the slides and stuff."

"What? As a tiny fluffy mammal? That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. And Natasha says _I_ embarrass myself." He pictures Thor and Natasha gamboling around playground equipment with what to all appearances--to someone woefully under informed about animal species, at least--is their small bushy tailed dog and is _so_ sure Natasha is doing it to mess with him.

Clint grins. He looks kind of disgustingly pleased. "Yeah. Right up until that fucking labrador it was great."

"Huh. Maybe I want to age-inappropriately usurp the use of recreational public space with Thor too, if it's so amazing. You know the playground is for children, right? _Real_ children, just in case you have some eight-year-old human shift in there too somewhere."

"That's not fair. Nat never got to do those things as a kid, and now she's too old?"

"Hang on. How is this about Natasha now? I'm talking about you and how you're willing to trade your dignity for ear scratches."

Clint leans against his desk and smirks. He's totally stolen that smug look from Tony, and apparently everyone is right. It is pretty obnoxious, and does kind of make one itch to smack him. 

Clint says," Mind if I hang?"

"Do I look like I'm stopping you?"

There's a few seconds of silence where Clint tries to decipher his pissy tone, trying to figure out if it's genuine or not. "Stay," Tony sighs, and again feels like a jerk, for being a shit about Clint's day, which was apparently good even though he nearly got eaten by a retriever. "Seriously. Stay."

Clint grins and a moment later, Tony's warming his feet on a striped hide and Clint's rumbling softly under his desk.

\----

"You know there's other shifters out there," Bruce says, kind of non-sequiturially, while Clint's busy stalking Thor across the practice floor, his orange and black stripes doing nothing to conceal him among the bright blue of the crash mats. He looks up from his belly crawl and twitches his tail in irritation, but whether it's at the obviousness of Bruce's not-question or because he thinks he was actually hidden, Tony can't tell.

Thor gets the jump on him while he's glaring at Bruce, and they roll across the mats until Clint twists away and leaps to a catwalk, racing along it before dropping on to Steve. 

Steve goes down yelling, because while he's getting used to having an enormous predator lounging around their living space, having one spring on him from above, all grappling paws and bared teeth is another thing altogether. "Dammit, Clint. I'm _doing_ something," he snaps, and Clint slinks back, but it's not really a cower anymore. It's more predatory, his back legs working in preparation, finding purchase. Steve glares, and Clint pounces on the heavy bag instead, swinging on it, claws dug in, before he climbs the whole contraption back to the catwalk.

Steve looks like he wants to yell again, but instead he looks across at Bruce and Tony and huffs a laugh, shaking his head. It's a totally different Clint than the one he and Tony had ambushed sneaking into the tower, than the one Tony had confronted in the woods, who couldn't see any course of action other than to run from them. Or at least, it's a momentarily much improved Clint.

Clint drops on Thor, and immediately goes limp, a dead weight over his shoulders and even Thor stumbles a bit under that. Then he braces himself and hooks an arm around Clint's head, scratching his ruff. Clint rumbles, sliding until his back feet are on the ground again, giant paws draped over Thor's shoulders from behind.

"What's _is_ your deal with Thor?" Tony asks, when Clint gets tired of being the tiger and shifts back. 

Clint shrugs, dressing in track pants, barefoot. It's not proper workout attire--danger of stomped toes, for one--but it doesn't stop him from trying to wrestle Thor without a few hundred pounds of cat behind it. Like the whole tiger/fox/maybe-lion-no-one-has-seen ridiculousness has bled over into everything else. 

Thor throws him into a pile of mats, and Clint rolls and comes up grinning, dodges around Thor with a sneaky little ducking pivoting move. And, when Thor doesn't give chase, pads back to where Tony's pretending to work out, and Bruce is observing because really, what's the point when it's _Bruce_.

Tony gives Clint a look. He'd text Natasha about it, but he doesn't think Natasha's on his side anymore, after he made fun of the whole park picnic sexy couple cute dog thing.

\----

"Even when I'm the fox," Clint says later, continuing the conversation like there'd been no time gap between Tony asking the question and now, indicating the size of the fox with his hands. Tony's not sure whether, assuming the ability to become a tiny adorable animal, it's more dignified to exaggerate larger or smaller. He can't decide if he thinks Clint's too-small approximation is Clint being modest or thinking he's tinier and cuter than he actually is.

Clint says, "Thor's." and stops. His mouth pulls. "He put me inside his jacket." Clint says, "In the park. After the retriever thing," but it's without a smile now, serious and maybe embarrassed. _Shy_ , Tony thinks and wants to roll his eyes. 

"It's not like _that_ ," Clint says, with an exasperated look, "My brother _sold_ me, Tony. When he found out, he sold me." His voice is soft. Hurt. If he was the fox right now, Tony would scoop him up, but he isn't. "Thor--"

Thor's ridiculously careful, even with the killer jungle cat. Throws ping pong balls for the fox and carries him around like a favorite house pet. Throws human-shape Clint across the gym, sure, but always into mats. Mostly always, anyway, because Thor's aim is great, but it's not impeccable.

Tony says, "And here I thought _Steve_ was everyone's big brother."

"Steve's everyone's vaguely traumatized single child older cousin," Clint says.


	6. Chapter 6

Bruce tries to bring up other shifters again, but Clint's apparently not that keen on the idea of socializing. Tony can kind of see where he's coming from. It's not like Banner's that keen on the idea of addressing his anger management issues in a supportive group environment, either.

"You don't want to learn the history of your people?" Tony harangues Clint anyway, just to watch him act sulky and irritated, slouching at the kitchen table like Bruce is his nagging overbearing parent.

"You know I _have_ met other shifters, right?" Clint says. He has his knees propped against the edge of the table, feet hanging. His unintentional impersonation of a testy teenager is hilariously accurate. He spins the salt shaker, making it clatter noisily on the wood. "They're mostly dogs and stuff."

"I get that. I don't like to hang with the ordinaries, either," Tony says, "That's why I have you guys."

Clint frowns, like he hadn't thought of that angle. "No. Just. Everyone else _disappears_."

"You're not going to disappear, Clint," Bruce says gently, but Clint looks up sharply, with the best fuck-you face Tony's seen on him since he decided Tony wasn't going to use him for research after all.

"I already did," he says, and stalks off.

\-----

Clint doesn't change for days after that, staying human all through the weekend to what's probably Natasha's disappointment. Skips out on medical after he takes a bad fall off the top of a backhoe, of all things, because that's what their weekends are like, and Steve doesn't even give him grief over it. Just pulls ice packs out of the freezer when they get back to the tower and waves Clint back to the couch when he gets up to take care of it himself.

And Tony, just because he can't stop thinking about Clint falling off stuff, which leads him to thinking about Clint _flying_ off stuff, says, "You know there's a pretty big difference between hawks and eagles, right? An eagle is a lot bigger for one," because mocking trivia is the only way to broach sensitive, traumatic topics. Apparently.

Even as he says it, he wishes he hadn't, but Clint just slowly tips sideways until he's lying on the couch and eyes him out of the corner of his eye. Lets Steve set icepacks against his head and elbow and knee and under his back. "Okay," he says, "But what if it's either a big hawk or a small eagle and also you're nine years old?"

"I'd look it up." 

Clint gives him a look, "I mean, a _normal_ nine year old," he says, and shifts around trying to get comfortable. "I didn't know it would ever matter. I just wanted to look cool with a big fucking bird on my arm in front of the other nine year olds." He shivers and Tony pretends to believe it's about the ice he has packed around him like he's some kind of sushi buffet and tosses a blanket over him.

"God, they thought I was such a badass," Clint says, after a bit, with fond nostalgic pride, "That bird made me a god."

Tony thinks it's probably the blow to the head putting Clint at ease more than _actual_ ease. "What? God of the fourth grade? Color me impressed, Barton." He doesn't mean to make every conversation sound like a competition, but it somehow always sort of happens.

Clint blinks dopily, and Tony's not sure it's really that good an idea, Steve letting him skip out on the docs, even if Clint's troubled relationship with medical makes sudden brutal sense. 

"I didn't really go to school much," Clint says with his eyes closed and a painful, far away smile on his face. "Or, you know, after a certain point." Tony feels so sad for him suddenly, that he sort of wants to hit him, but the rest of them would probably think it was weird if he did.

He goes to build some shit instead.

\----

"You think there's any way to get whoever got Barton?" he asks Bruce, while Bruce is doing some unimportant fussy thing involving test tubes and coloured liquids. Bruce looks at him for a few seconds, like he's catching up, and Tony makes a hurry-it-along motion at him. 

It's distressing how often he has to do that.

"Does Barton want us to get who got him?" Bruce says carefully, and Tony's pretty sure that echo of his wording is supposed to be mockery. He ignores it.

"I didn't ask him. _I_ want to." 

Bruce sighs and stoppers his bottles. Sits back in his chair. "We don't know anything about them, Tony. You think Clint's in any shape to go over it? He's still waiting for us to sell him to a zoo or something."

Tony _pffts_ , "No, he's not." 

Bruce gives him that you-think-you're-so-smart-but-you-make-me-sad-Tony-Stark look. A concerned little raising of his brows, a sympathetic pull at the corner of his mouth. It's completely patronizing. Before the Avengers, he never had to put up with this kind of shit.

Sometimes, he really misses being surrounded by kiss-ups and brown nosers.

" _Fine_ ," he says and pokes half-heartedly at the insides of some machine he's absently pieced together for no reason, trying to figure out where he had been going with it. 

"But if they're still operational--?" He lets it hang. Just the suggestion that someone might be out there still torturing kids and fluffy animals should be enough to soften Bruce up. Rile up whatever feeling it was he had that caused him to go traipsing around the developing nations playing doctor to orphans and whatnot.

Bruce says, "I doubt they are," and calmly checks a measurement. Peers at his notebook. Tony smirks at him, but only because it's his go-to reaction when he doesn't know how else to react. Bruce puts his pen down and gives him a steady, serious look.

"You think they'd just let Clint go? That's not how illegal human experimentation works."

He doesn't ask what Bruce is getting at. He knows what Bruce is getting at, and wishes he'd stop talking. Wishes he hadn't started talking to Bruce at all, because _fuck_ Bruce.

"If they were operational and done with him," Bruce says, because he's an asshole, "They would have put him down."

Tony knew it was coming, but it still feels like the air is punched out of him. "Fuck you, Bruce," he says, "Stop fucking talking."

"Or locked him up and thrown away the key,"

"Bruce, for the love of god."

\----

The way Clint gets out of the lab is by fire, which is somehow fitting, although he isn't sure why he thinks so. At the time, it seemed like some kind of divine intervention, even considering the way things were--smoke everywhere, sirens and alarms blaring, people screaming. Not because he thinks he's going to survive, because he's pretty sure he isn't, but just because no one else is going to get to live either and he thinks that's fair. Fair enough, anyway.

Fire, explosion, smoke. Shots, he thinks later, when enough time has passed and he's able to sift through the memories with something that at least resembles distance. When he's older and seen similar things from a different angle and burnt some of them to the ground himself. He learns that the sort of people with an interest in capturing and experimenting on shifters and 'gifted' children have a tendency to be shady and have enemies of their own.

It makes sense, later, that it ends the way it does.

At the time, he only cares that it's ending at all.


	7. Chapter 7

Clint continues to stay untransformed, even though Natasha gives him meaningful looks and pretend-absently pats him when they're watching TV, like she hasn't noticed that he isn't a furry animal. He dodges Thor a bit, too, which probably hurts Thor's feelings, and makes Tony feel a bit better about some of the stuff he's said or done to Clint lately that could be construed as dick moves. 

"This is because you wouldn't shut up about the shifter's union or support group or whatever the fuck it was," Tony tells Bruce, when a week goes by with one invasion of what appears to be mutant sea mammals, and zero human-to-animal shapeshifting.

"You don't think it's because you had to bring up your expertise in ornithology?" Bruce asks, in the gently concerned voice that either means he's being sarcastic or feels guilty and is deflecting. Tony scowls at him because they might be taking pot shots at each other, but that's usually supposed to go one way.

He's pretty sure Clint's not pissed about the hawk eagle thing, but mostly because Clint had been suffering head trauma at the time that conversation took place and probably didn't remember it too clearly. He tells Bruce, "No, I'm pretty sure it was the you thing." He pauses. "Maybe I should talk to him."

Bruce looks at him. Measuring and silent. After a while he says, "Maybe you shouldn't."

\----

"Do you think you're over reacting?" Tony asks anyway, with the perfect timing of being in the middle of what would be a fire fight if it wasn't for the fact that it seemed to involve more globs of acid than incendiaries. Clint looks at him from behind the overturned car he's using as shelter.

"What?" he asks over the comms, clearly not following, then has to duck as a gelatinous mass splatters into the car, sending bits of caustic jelly spraying everywhere. Clint bobs up to loose an arrow, then hits pavement again. "You think I should just walk on over there?"

"I don't mean the ducking." Tony's high up and out of range. He fires off a few shots, giving Clint time to jump the car and make for shelter that will give him a better vantage point. He waits till Clint's slid under a jack-knifed truck--nice move, that--and gotten himself into the relative safety of an apartment foyer. Watches him kick in the door and disappear inside to re-appear on a fire escape four floors up. "Or, I'm talking about the ducking, but not _this_ ducking. I mean the one where you're--"

"Tony," Clint says, and doesn't exactly sound upset, but like he _would_ sound upset if he wasn't busy being a professional.

"Quiet on the comms," Steve says, but it's not his usual come-on-you-guys exasperation or the sterner I'm-in-charge-here bark that he uses when things are serious and possibly about to go to shit.

The acid spitters figure out their trajectory isn't working anymore and then figure out how to aim high. 

Clint figures out how to aim right down what is either their cannon or their nose or something else probably equally disturbing. Probably _more_ disturbing. His static angle isn't doing him any favors, though, Tony notices, at about the same time that Clint gets back on the comms.

"What's a guy gotta do to get a lift?" he asks, and Tony zips over to pluck him off the fire escape, to carry him pretty much into the line of fire. Or the line of acid globs. Or whatever. It makes him a bit ill, later, when he realizes how much paint has been burned right off the Iron Man suit, and that _Clint's_ suit is definitely not iron.

"You should have at least elbow pads," Tony tells him, hanging out while Clint gets some kind of cooling goo slathered over the injuries caused by the burning goo. "You have less protection than a skateboarder."

Clint watches the tiny SHIELD medic who looks like she's around fifteen and probably into skateboarding with a mild kind of anxiousness. In the past, Tony would have thought he was worried about her healthcare credentials and whether she's old enough to be administering drugs. Knowing what he knows now, he thinks it's probably just that she's administering drugs at all.

"You want to try to shoot a bow with elbow pads on, genius?" Clint grumbles, before realizing that the sarcasm is lost, because Tony finds that a perfectly legitimate term of address. Appreciates the recognition, even.

Clint might have a point, but he should have _something_ other than his body armor vest thing, because his arms are covered in splatter-shaped burns. "We dodged the worst of it, anyway," he says as the medic plasters stick-on protective squares--not quite jelly-like and faintly blue--all over him, then covers them with bandages.

"Yeah we did," Tony says, and because he was the one in charge of the dodging, "You can thank me any time."

\----

Instead, when they get back to the tower, Clint says, "I'm not mad or anything," doing that thing again where he picks up conversations hours later and expects Tony to know what the hell he's talking about. It's lucky for him that Tony is Tony, because _some_ people would need to play catch up, or ask what he meant. Bruce, for instance.

Tony frowns at his armor and its patches of bare metal and wonders if it says anything about him, the amount of time he spends re-coating and polishing the damn thing. "Of course not," he tells Clint, "Because that would be stupid. Because nobody _did_ anything for you to be mad about." It doesn't really mean much. Clint's shown that his thought processes can reach depths of stupidity that frankly impress Tony. Or horrify him, one or the other.

"To be honest," he says, "I've never had anyone suspect me capable of human trafficking before, so I'm not really sure how to handle this new social situation." No one's really suspected him capable of non-consensual human experimentation before, either, but bringing it up again might seem too much like grudge holding. 

"I don't think that," Clint says, and scratches uneasily at a bandage, the liar. Tony hopes his burns really itch. A lot.

"Well you either think that or you're over reacting. Or you think it's Bruce or Steve or someone who's going to turn on you, which isn't actually that much better." It's not really fair, because he's extrapolating from stuff Bruce said, and putting the words in Clint's mouth, but Clint's been acting like he wants to take back the whole I am a tiger business and go back to being weird and secretive about it.

As if it was even possible to put that cat back in the bag, so to speak.

"I don't--" Clint starts to repeat himself, but Tony cuts him off.

"Yeah, yeah. You don't think that. So then what's with the I-don't-want-to-be-fluffy-anymore-because-Bruce-thinks-I-need-friends act?"

Clint doesn't answer. Just shrugs a little, helplessly. Then, softly, "It's just better if there's no proof or witnesses or--"

"And did you decide this while you were playing on the seesaws with Thor?"

"That's different."

"Yeah? That's convenient."

Clint takes a breath, eyes flashing like he's going to say something angry and mean. Or maybe just angry, because Tony's pretty sure he's being enough of an asshole to Clint that anything Clint might retaliate with probably falls under fair play. 

Clint doesn't get to say whatever it is though, because that's when Steve cuts in with, "Enough, Tony," and when did he walk in anyway. Tony scowls at him. It's really not justifiable, to be so pissed at Clint, but he's never let reason stop him before. At least, not unless he wanted it to.

Steve looks at Clint's wrapped arms, the top of the bandages disappearing under a t-shirt, and then at Tony's temporarily be-fucked armor. "Came to see if you guys were okay," he says, and now there's concern layered over the disapproval.

"Fine," Tony says, setting the pieces of suit down so he can stalk away with dignity, "but Shere Khan over there thinks nothing good can come from us man cubs."

He hears Clint say again, but to Steve, "I don't think that," but he doesn't hear Steve's response because the door hisses shut behind him.

He really wishes he'd set them up to be slamable.


	8. Chapter 8

The stupid argument with Clint stays stupid, but it also stays an argument, even though it had kind of escalated from nothing. Tony's pretty sure that bullying someone into ease and comfort isn't a plan that's built for success, but for Clint he's willing to try.

"You're doing it for yourself," Natasha tells him, when Clint's ducked away from her pretending-I-don't-notice-you're-not-a-tiger pats and skulked off. "Because your feelings are hurt." It's almost like she's accusing him of being self-centered. Tony frowns.

"You just miss your cute animal based popularity," he tells her huffily and retreats to his lab.

But Bruce is there and Bruce says, "I don't want to talk about how this is my fault."

"It is your fault. And now _Natasha_ is mad at me too, I just want you to know. On the off chance you actually might decide to step up and take some of the heat. The only one who hasn't lectured me yet is Thor, and I bet that's coming any time."

\-----

Thor's lecture doesn't come, which is just as well, because Tony already feels a bit like a shit and he doesn't think Thor's sincere, heartfelt looks of disapproval are likely to do much for it. What does come is Clint, sliding into his lab, again in the dead of night.

About twenty mean, snappy things to say go through Tony's head, but almost all of them are uncalled for and, while probably satisfying, mostly unnecessary. Instead he says, "Hey, Barton," calling it across the lab. Clint's mouth pulls. It's like the little smile that could.

"Hey," he says, and comes around the desk to lean there like the night after he was almost dog chow. He slides a cup of coffee over like a peace offering, and great. Now Tony feels like even more of a shit.

"I'm not pissed either," he says, referring, Clint-like, to their previous conversation and taking the coffee. The fruits of Clint's coffee making labors tend to oscillate from too watery to what-is-a-stomach-lining, but this cup is reasonably decent. He sort of wants to ask how many tries it took Clint, but doesn't. It would probably come off wrong, the way things have been going when he opens his mouth. 

"Then you're doing a good job of faking it," Clint says. He leans a bit further back, hands on the edge of the desk. He has his boots on, even though it's probably like two in the morning, but at least they're unlaced, his feet kind of sloppily jammed in. He catches Tony looking and shrugs one shoulder, like he realizes that Tony realizes that part of his defensive reaction is to be ready to go _right now_ , and doesn't care that Tony's reading him like a book.

Tony snorts over the rim of the coffee mug. Says, "Back at you."

Clint huffs. It's not a laugh. "Tony."

"No. I'm pissed at Bruce. Bruce is an _asshole_. He's secretly traumatizing me when no one else is looking."

If Clint pieces anything together from the combination of that and Tony's arguments, he doesn't show it. 

"It was just the acid thing," Tony says. The acid thing and the fact that Clint will let Tony fly him into the firing range of projectiles that could melt his skin right off, but one wrong mention of the shifting thing and it's all hatches down, weather the storm, fire in the hole paranoia.

Clint picks at his wrist, where the bandage is secured and frowns, "The acid thing? Because your suit looks like shit now?"

"No, genius," and that works _so_ much better for Tony.

"Yeah? Because it'll look like shit all over TV for at least a week," and okay. Maybe he is a bit put out about the suit. Clint grins a bit, without looking up. Tugs the end of the bandage loose and starts rolling it, the burn treatment protection jelly things coming away with the gauze. He's weirdly tidy about it, the rolled bandage a neat, even bundle in his hand. Something about his lean against the desk has become very, very casual.

Tony wheels his chair back and away to give Clint a considering look. Watches him set the bandage aside and start on the other. "What are you doing?" He asks. Clint doesn't look up.

"I don't know. Unpissing you off?" Clint really does sound like he doesn't know, which is weird, because he's moving with purpose. He sets the second rolled bandage next to the first and gets rid of his boots, toeing them off and pushing them aside. Stands there barefoot as he catches the hem of his t-shirt and pulls it over his head. It turns inside out as it goes.

"Usually," Tony says, "This sort of thing is sexier and has more music."

Clint doesn't react. He drops the shirt then steps out of his pants with what looks like reluctance, tossing them after the boots, sloppy after all the care with the bandages, then meets Tony's eyes and takes a deep breath, like he's preparing to dive.


	9. Chapter 9

If he had been the bird, blinded, bound, he never would have made it. Would have died choking on smoke, unable to change back, or lost his feet and died that way, bleeding out before the fire got to him. He has no doubt that, had he been the bird and shifted back, the jesses would not have given way. Safety had never been a concern. He was nearly as much use to them crippled as he was whole. Maybe nearly as much use dead as alive. 

It's only by luck that he's himself, and in a position to run, because they had been at that game again, making him hold the shape until he's almost tempted to risk the change, severed limbs be damned. It's only by luck that he's not blasted by fire when they first sweep through the lab.

He's been the tiger so often, that he reaches for it by reflex. Then, as the flames roar towards him, changes his mind.

Instead, he becomes the lion. 

\----

"Well, fuck," Tony says, and he's not sure what reaction Clint wants from him, because he just sits there, head turned away a little, watching Tony with one golden eye. There's something unnerving about that human intelligence in an animal's face and Tony hadn't noticed it before, when Clint was spending his animal time mostly making a fool out of himself.

He's somewhat smaller in this shape than when he's the tiger, but the dark thickness of his mane more than makes up for it, adding presence, emphasizing the mass of his shoulders, making him seem solid and _huge_. Tony buries his hands in it, even though he's not sure that's what Clint intended or if this means they're on friendly terms again, but _fuck_. And also, Natasha will have snit fits of envy.

And then Clint turns his head, facing Tony full-on, but angling his body, and it takes a second to see what it is that Clint's showing him. 

"Jesus, Clint." 

The lion is blind in one eye. _Tidily_ blind, and Tony's heard enough brutal as crap stories about things that go on in labs to know what that probably means. To know that the neat ridges of fur on his face and leg and body mean scarring that's keeping the hairs from laying flat. Pale splotches of bare skin curl over his rump and rear leg, curving around and down his side, to disappear under his belly, the mess of it all at odds with the cold precision of the surgical scars.

Clint makes the big cat chuffing noise that they'd been getting used to and lays his head on Tony's lap like some kind of gigantic dog, more still than Tony's ever seen him in a shift. A sort of controlled quiet. "I thought damage carried over," Tony says, combing through Clint's mane. The hair is long and coarse and his fingers catch in it as they pull through tangles. If there's more scarring hidden underneath, he can't feel it through the thickness. Clint's tail is tucked close to him, around his body, to lay over one foot, neat as a house cat.

Tony tugs his mane back, frowning at the precise scars around the eye, milky where the other is gold. Clint twitches his nose, single eye flickering up to Tony's face, and Tony's not sure what he's supposed to read in it, because Clint's still Clint, but his expressions come out totally different when filtered through animal features. There's something awkward about Clint-the-lion, like he hasn't had quite enough practice translating his humanity into lion form. Which is funny, because structurally it's not much different to the tiger.

He says so and Clint lets out a whuff of amusement. It's similar to the obnoxious mocking snort Clint makes when he's himself but there's a rumble in it that's not so much leonine as just _big_ , a testament to how much larger his chest cavity is now. 

"That sounds much less patronizing when you're a cat," Tony tells him, and Clint flicks his ears, the notched rims of them peering out of his mane. Even the notches are tidy. Tony touches them, careful in case Clint objects. Five hundred pounds of lion is less than six hundred of tiger, but it's still more cat than Tony wants slamming around his lab in a frenzy.

Clint lays his ears back when Tony rubs his thumb over the split edges, but he doesn't move. His eyes close, but even with the damage to the pale blind eye hidden, he still looks like an animal someone's used badly, cut up and put back together but not really fixed. He _looks_ , for all that he's well and healed, like a lab animal. 

"Clint," Tony says, holding his big--and thick, the dumbass--skull in both hands, tilting Clint's head so he can look directly into his single orange eye, "what the hell are you doing?"

\----

He's bigger and stronger and faster as a cat--either of them--than he is as himself. Even his skin feels thicker, less penetrable. When the fire roars towards him, the only choice he has, really, is which cat, because even if he isn't getting out, he has to at least _try_. 

And if he burns in the attempt, well, the lion is broken anyway.

\----

A blink of the eye later, and Tony has a very human Clint Barton sitting on the floor by his chair instead of the lion and even more troubling than Clint's new found comfort with nudity, is that Tony barely blinks at the rampant nakedness that's been taking over his lab lately. Clint reaches to grab his pants, but only pulls them over and doesn't get dressed.

"I have no idea what you were trying to accomplish here," Tony tells him, "But I hope you feel successful." Clint smiles. That wry, painful look that's more like a Bruce expression than a Clint one. He fiddles with the button of his jeans, and at least he has them over his lap now if he's not going to actually put them back on.

"Damage carries over," Clint says, finally answering the question, and gestures, indicating the splatter of acid burns on his arms, and shrugs, "but." He doesn't have to finish. They did something to him to lock away the injury done to that one form. Lion. Tiger. They're similar enough that utterly fucking one of them up isn't a great loss, and the tiger is arguably more useful. Or bigger, anyway and probably faster.

Clint looks down, like his battered jeans are the most interesting fashion item on the planet. "I was awake when they took the eye," he says, and Tony has no idea how to react. Just looks down at the back of his head. Clint says it so matter-of-factly that Tony doesn't even know if he's supposed to be horrified or enraged or slide to the floor next to Clint and hug him. 

But that seems like it would be awkward, even if it was appropriate, and Tony's still figuring out the mechanics of how to do it without it being weird, when Clint laughs a little, self-deprecating and embarrassed. Maybe finally figuring out that whatever page he's on, he's on it all by himself. "I was fine, it turned out," he says, like Tony hadn't noticed. Like it's the wholeness of his human skin that is the shock.

"If you think this is fine, you're out of your mind," Tony says, and he's not sure who he's channeling. Maybe Natasha. His voice comes out with more than a touch of her quiet--not anguish exactly. Maybe regretful cynicism. He doesn't really sound like himself, but then he's also kind of choked by relief at the sight of Clint's unscarred face. His sighted eyes--left and right--blue gray and perfectly normal. 

Clint looks away. Gives a kind of fatalistic mini-shrug. "It's just better if no one else knows," he says, and finally starts getting dressed.


	10. Chapter 10

Clint hasn't said that their nude assasin lab nights were a secret or private or anything, so Tony tells Bruce, but mostly so he can tell Bruce Clint's weirdness is all his fault. He doesn't really mean for Bruce to get offended and pissy at Clint about it. He's actually starting to feel for Clint, because it's his trauma and now everyone is getting in on it.

Bruce says, "You don't have to do anything you don't want to, Clint. It was just a suggestion. It was _a thought_. I was even mostly _kidding_." He pauses for effect and Clint glares, probably out of reflex, then realizes that Bruce isn't actually arguing with him up and stops.

"Bruce," he says, but Bruce keeps talking.

"I don't know what they did to you, Clint, but you don't have to prove that it was _bad enough_. For god's sake. You can just say _no_." 

" _That's_ what you were doing?" Tony asks, and the urge he has to smack Clint is similar, somehow, to the urge to roll his eyes so hard they get stuck. He doesn't do either though, because Clint is a giant moron, but at least he has the decency to look shamed about it. "Your cries for help need work, Barton," Tony says and still wants to shake him, but Bruce changes his tone to a gentle, patient one, and that makes doing Clint violence seem somehow more inappropriate.

Bruce says, softly, "Of course it was bad, Clint. I know it was bad. I know, and I was at least an adult. You were _a child_."

"Only for a bit of it," Clint says, for no reason that makes any sense to Tony, because it sounds like he's defending his own enslavement and torture. Bruce looks at him, then pats his arm. Gently, like he thinks Clint might misunderstand his intentions if he isn't careful, which is probably not that far fetched, considering.

"You were _a child_ ," Bruce repeats, "and they had you for years and they had no right."

"I wasn't a child," Clint says, "When they took the eye, I was an adult." 

" _Clint_." Bruce looks somewhere between pissed and like he wants to cry. Tony takes a step back, just in case Bruce's emotions are actually going in a different direction than surface appearances indicated, but Clint just looks at him, then shrugs a little. Bruce sighs. "Okay," he says, "Even then. _Even then_ , you don't have to justify anything. You don't want to shift, don't shift. If Tony nags you, break his arm."

\-----

Clint stays unshifted and weird for a while longer, and Tony tries to not take it personally, and not bug him about it, but mostly he leaves him alone because Bruce's _meaningful looks_ are even more annoying than Clint's insecurity and it's implied accusations.

But Clint catches Tony looking at him during a briefing and says, in the hall, "I hope you're not mentally building a cyborg eye or something, because I don't think that would actually work."

Tony wasn't, or really, had already thought about and dismissed it, because damage might not carry over from the lion, but who the fuck knew what surgically implanted robotic parts might do, considering the whole clothing and constriction thing. Probably not anything good. "I was thinking more an eye patch," he says, nodding back towards the conference room, "Like Fury."

Clint snorts that unamused laugh he does and doesn't answer, but later he brings Tony coffee again, and this time it doesn't involve distressing revelations or nudity.

Tony's not sure what to make of it, but the coffee's pretty decent again, which is two out of two and kind of rare for Clint.

\----

Of course it's Natasha Clint goes to first. Tony finds them lumped together in front of a window, the floor-to-ceiling glass granting a view across the city, all the way to the water and allowing sunlight to spill over them. Natasha's reading, because Natasha, it turns out, is kind of a secret lit nerd, stretched on her stomach on a blanket that she has spread over the fluffy rug, like they're on some kind of pretend picnic, lounging on pretend grass. 

Clint's stretched out alongside her, but with his head somehow twisted around to rest in the curve of her back. He's clearly perfected the feline art of looking utterly comfortable in awkward, contorted positions. 

"Shut it, Stark" Natasha says mildly, before he's even really formed the comment, and Tony twists his smirk into an innocent, hurt look. 

Natasha doesn't seem to care at all about having missed out on the lion, which is just obnoxious of her, so Tony pretends it was awesome and not sad and horrible and a sign of Clint being damaged and socially inept. In retaliation, he pretends not to care about Clint playing favorites with the tiger.

"Hey, I'm just walking through," he says, indifferent and casual like he hasn't noticed anything out of the ordinary at all. Natasha turns the page and looks up to smile at him. Sweet and happy and sun drenched and she's totally gloating. 

Clint huffs a bit at all the talking, and shifts but doesn't wake, sliding his head from Natasha's back to shove his nose under the angle of her arm, where she's propping herself up on her elbows, using her to shield his eyes from the sun. 

"You sleep all the time when you're a cat," Tony tells him, "It's not actually less lazy just because you're furry, you know."

Natasha adjusts her lean to make room for Clint's big cat nose and says, "It's what cats do," with all the confidence of an expert.

She's way too happy about it and about her usurping of Tony's tiger that he'd seen first. _Way_ first. In fact, he doesn't point out, Natasha was _the last_ to know. "What do you know about cats," he snorts instead, testily, and it's not supposed to be a question, but it's not supposed to sound so peeved either.

"I had one once," Natasha says and smiles as she pats Clint's ears. "She was my mother's, really. For mousing." Then the smile slides away and she looks distant before shrugging and going back to her book. "It was a long time ago," she says.

\----

It's obvious Thor hasn't been bothered by the period of tigerlessness the way Tony and--in a different way--Natasha had been. Doesn't seem distressed by the turns of Clint's logic the way Bruce was. He greets the return of the four footed versions of Clint--or rather, doesn't greet them--as if they'd never disappeared behind Clint's wall of anxious paranoia.

Tony finds him at breakfast, feeding the tiger strips of bacon under the table and can't decide if it's bizarre for his life now, or not. "Stop that," he says, "You're teaching him to beg."

"He's not a house pet," Natasha scoffs and it's not quite clear if that's more I-had-a-cat-once tiger expertise, or if she's defending Clint's dignity. 

Wild animals don't eat bacon, Tony could say, but the whole thing is too inane for not having had coffee yet, so instead he ignores them and stumbles towards the pot. Feels around in the cupboard for a mug. They're always low on dishes and he'd ask whose turn it was, but it's probably his and he doesn't want to remind anyone if it is. He can't really remember the last time he took a turn.

Clint reaches for more bacon and hits his head on the edge of the table, rattling all the dishes, and sloshing the juice in Natasha's glass. A moment later, Clint says, "Ow," and after that, emerges small and tawny and bushy tailed.

So they're back to hyper levels of transformation. Tony's not sure if it's Clint giving them a chance, or Clint testing them, or spinning out, or what. Thor holds up a finger and Clint tidily drops his rump. Lifts his forefeet in the classic begging-dog pose. 

Tony gives up on finding a mug and pours the coffee into a regular water glass instead.

\----

"Are you my groupie?" Tony asks, when Clint comes back again, to hang out in the lab and touch things that are dangerous and mess up the careful order of Tony's things. Clint looks down at himself. Wrinkles his nose.

"I don't think so," he says, like love and admiration of Tony Stark is something that would be visible on the outside, but he's not sure what the signs are. He looks like he's sniffing milk, testing for sourness, and Tony wants to throw something at him, but his work is important, and that includes all the small-enough-to-lob, well-weighted-for-flight parts too.

He's pretty sure Clint isn't a man he wants to get into a fight involving projectiles with anyway, so he grunts noncommittally instead, then frowns as Clint hops up to take a seat on the end of his desk. His feet dangle and the ends of his untied laces make annoying plinking noises against the metal as he thumps one heel against it's leg. The burns on his arms are mostly healed, the bandages replaced by the occasional large band-aid. He doesn't look like an assassin so much as a guy who's kind of alarmingly accident prone, but the already-fading marks are nothing compared to the burn scars coiling over the lion's rump and side.

"What?" Clint says, and stops swinging his leg, and Tony shrugs. Goes back to his work. Then feels Clint's eyes on him and swivels his chair around again to scan Clint head to toe and back. " _What?_ " Clint asks again, more impatiently, like he's not the one occupying someone else's work surface. Like maybe Tony is infringing on _his_ personal space.

"Nothing," Tony says, and waves a screw driver at him, "You're sitting on my blueprints."

Clint snorts, but twists a bit to look at the papers strewn over the desk, "I'm not sitting on anything. And you don't even work on paper, except for the stuff Pepper sends you, and you let me sleep on those in your inbox."

It hurts Tony that he does, in fact have an inbox, even if whatever Pepper leaves in there for him never makes it out. "It's my grease spill containment provisions holder," Tony tells him, "Where's my coffee?" 

It's like Clint thought he wouldn't notice that his regular tribute was missing. Or maybe more like thought that Tony wouldn't notice that he'd been bringing it in the first place. "Or is that just a making up thing?"

"It's a making up thing," Clint says, but Tony's pretty sure he's just worried he can't make the hattrick.

So there's no coffee and no reason for Clint to be there. Tony waits a bit for more disturbing reminiscences, but none come. Clint just hangs out for a while, and maybe a couple of times looks like he's about to say something, but he never does. 

At some point, while Tony's up to his ears in a new targeting system, Clint slips back out. Tony looks up to make a comment and he's just not there anymore. It's a pretty cool exit, but kind of irritating.

\-----

Natasha doesn't drag Thor and Clint back to the park with her now that the shifting is back, but she does cram the small bushy tailed version of Clint into her giant handbag and position a pair of sunglasses on her face. She looks pretty swanky and he's not sure what game she's playing at now, but Clint, the freak, is obviously into it, poking his nose and ears out as she totes him around the kitchen.

"You look glamorous," Steve tells her, which is a red flag for reminiscences about how movie stars aren't what they used to be and how _dignity_ should be the backbone of true stardom. Even Clint dips back into the handbag and disappears from view.

Natasha twirls her car keys on one finger--just one rotation before she catches them with a jingle and makes her exit. 

"Don't let your armpit dog hang his head out the window." Tony calls after her, because that's just sound pet owner safety advice.

\----

They aren't gone that long, and they didn't take Thor, who seems to be key component in whatever is going on in Natasha's probably bizarre inner life. It makes Tony think that the whole thing was some kind of cover, but Natasha doesn't give any clues as she putters around the kitchen, putting on water and rifling through the fridge with her sunglasses pushed up on her head. Clint, still foxed, but sitting in Clint's usual chair and just tall enough that he can scan the table top, doesn't give anything away either. Then again, it's admittedly harder to read him when he's busy being non-human.

Tony picks him up and puts him on the table, and steals the seat. He's not wearing the stupid giant ribbon, because that was as good as destroyed during the whole park incident, but he is wearing _a_ ribbon. Tony tugs at it in case Clint needs rescuing, but Clint just puts his head at an angle and licks his own nose and Tony decides to let him stay stuck.

"You know going out with Thor and Nat all the time isn't exactly conducive to keeping you a secret," he says, "so if anyone asks, I'm going to say you're an Akita Chihuahua mix." It's even plausible, with Clint's fluffy tail, sharp face and standing up ears. It's probably what everyone who saw him had been assuming. Or something along those lines, anyway.

Clint somehow manages to look offended and scratches at the ribbon with a hind leg like he wants to get it off so he can change back and give Tony a piece of his mind. Tony secures the bow so he can't. Catches him by the toes of the offending rear foot and pulls him off balance. Clint being tiny sort of has it's uses, but his teeth being tiny sort of makes them really sharp. Tony uses his free hand to shove his snout away and Clint growls, low and hilariously unthreatening as he hops around on three feet trying to keep from being tipped over. 

"You're an Akichi," Tony suggests, because of course Tony Stark would have a trendy mix breed, complete with trendy mix breed name. He's not like those tacky insecure billionaires who have to have Belgian malamutes and corgis traced to the royal line and shit like that. Clint makes a grumpy noise. "No? Akichua? Chihuakita? I like that. Chihuakita it is."

"It's pretty simple," he says, letting Clint's foot go and gesturing smoothly with a glass he snatches up from the table, as if Clint was his guest at a cocktail party and they were making small talk, "It's an Akichua if the mother is an Akita. The other way around it's a Chihuakita. Or did I get that mixed up? Anyway, it's like the liger tigon thing."

"Which, by the way, is apparently inhumane. Let me tell you about Stark Industries' commitment to helping preserve _natural_ environmental diversity." Tony gives him his schmoozing-with-bigwigs grin and Clint's ears go sideways. 

He can have his secrets with Natasha, but Tony is damn well going to get even.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note that a bit got left out at the beginning of the previous chapter, and I've put it back in.

If Tony can get himself into one situation requiring tiger rescue, he can get himself into multiple situations requiring tiger rescue, so of course it happens again. Pretty much the way it happened the first time, but downtown instead of in a forest and in broad daylight. 

He's thrown onto his back, in a position about as tactically effective as a flipped turtle, struggling to get his thrusters to fire instead of clicking and coughing like he's left his headlights on and killed the battery, again about to be smashed to bits, when Clint barrels out of nowhere, a steak of orange and white that slams into the behemoth threatening to crush Tony. 

Now that he's fighting in earnest, it's really obvious how much Clint was holding back while wrestling around with Thor. His claws make grating shrieking noises on the thing's scaled body, and all the trashing in the world can't loose Clint's teeth from what Tony guesses is equivalent to the thing's shoulder. Clint does a sharp springy slinky move that a spine shouldn't be able to do and he and the thing go down, rolling off the pile of shattered concrete and brick that had been about to be the scene of Tony's demise, and into the shadowed bay of a parking garage.

"Don't bother trying to get Clint on comms," Tony tells the others, "I don't think the ear piece fits him right now. Also, the suit is dead. The damn thing ate my charge." The suit is powered by the arc reactor, so it's a bit worrying that the beast can do that. Tony tries not to think about it.

Or about how he was apparently being out-usefulness-ed by a giant cat.

Moving in the suit when it's fried is a pretty undignified ordeal, so Tony decides to hold still. In the parking garage, he catches glimpses of Clint, heading upwards, though out of instinct or habit or because he makes really stupid plans, Tony's not sure. "Hawkeye might need a catch," he tells the comms, and hopes someone can steer the Hulk over.

Hopes the Hulk recognizes Clint when he's significantly oranger and not human.

He's still about as mobile--and useful--as a paperweight when Cap and Hulk catch up. Steve pauses to rap on his faceplate and ask, "You okay in there?" like Tony's locked himself in the bathroom or something, but the Hulk just thunders by, spraying gravel and debris from under his feet.

"Who's there?" Tony says, and maybe knock-knock jokes were invented after Steve's time because he looks a little confused, a little concerned. "I'm fine," he says, before Steve can get too lost or catch up and get too thrilled with himself, "Clint's heading for the roof, and I don't think jungle print is going to be that useful to him when he gets there."

Steve shades his eyes--because of course Clint would have to be a tiger in the middle of the day, because that's the way Clint apparently kept things secret. At least the fish scale monster creature was threatening enough that the camera crews had cleared the area for now. Tony bets that bit of good fortune is going to prove temporary as hell. There's already helicopter sounds in the distance, and Clint's made the roof, the creature gray and aquatic-slick and hard on his heels. He's in plain view and the orange of his coat isn't exactly camouflage against the gray of the concrete.

And then there's the fact that he's a tiger. Obviously.

Steve adjusts his grip on the shield and runs off to disappear into the garage, leaving Tony to stump clumsily after him. His power levels are climbing, but he doesn't want to risk it yet. Doesn't want to switch on the proverbial radio until the engine turns over.

He's stuck on the car metaphors. It's embarrassing. It's like he's shaming his own technology.

Steve's not slowed down by having to dodge and bait a monster, so he's on the roof in no time, and over the comms Tony can hear him yelling orders at Clint. Between the two of them, they get the thing backed across the roof level parking lot, but Clint's really only as good as his body mass right now, his claws and teeth not enough to break through the thing's scaly armor. Tony's pretty sure Steve's shield is just as useless. Blunt force trauma hasn't been proving effective, but to be honest, neither had Tony's blasters.

Natasha catches up as the Hulk appears belatedly on the roof-top and Tony wonders what the hell he's been doing that had let Steve pass him by. And then the suit hums back to life and _thank god_ because he can tell Natasha is about to say something she thinks is witty. Upstairs, Hulk is wrestling the creature and Clint is being mostly flung around, latched onto it's neck like he thinks he's an expert in tigeresque take-downs just because he's got the look down.

"Took your time," Tony remarks, turning the tables on Natasha as he hops and settles into a hover.

She's breathing a bit hard, but not hard enough that she can't manage to look disdainful. It's a skill that Tony respects. "I had a prior engagement," she tells him, like she's coming from a dinner fancier than this one. Thor's jogging up the street, looking like he's coming from a train wreck, singed and disheveled, but flipping his hammer casually in one hand.

And then the top floors of the garage crumble under the combined stompiness of the monster and the Hulk, sending rubble and broken concrete cascading into the street. Clint jumps clear as they all go down with it, making one of the lower floors, but Steve and Hulk and the creature ride the collapse, tumbling back onto ground level.

"I'm okay," Steve announces, and it sounds like it's a reflex. He probably double checks that assessment, because a few seconds later he confirms, "Yeah. Yeah, I'm okay."

The helicopters are overhead now, and either those things fly slower than he'd thought or the whole thing had happened a lot faster than it felt. "Where's Hawkeye?" he calls down the comms and then, because he _knows_ where Clint is. "Where's Hawkeye's clothes?"

He's above now, surveying the ground. Natasha and Thor have made it to where Cap and Hulk have the thing cornered against the building, backed up where two solid walls form an L shape. None of them have any time to go on a search for Clint's wardrobe, and neither, really, does Tony. 

In this instance, Nat's the least useful, so Tony zooms over, saying, "Trade, Widow. Get Hawkeye before someone decides to play animal control." Or before his naked ass is plastered all over CNN. Neither option will go down that well with Clint, probably, although the second one probably wouldn't go down that well with _Steve_ either. Team image and all that. The man had hang-ups.

Natasha makes an annoyed sound, but it's not like Tony's wrong, so she can't really argue. She breaks away from the fight--which mostly involves her dancing around trying not to get smushed--and heads back the way they'd come, to see if she could find where Clint had shed his uniform and gear. Tony would have headed for Clint and just _asked_ him where his shit was, but he wasn't going to argue with Natasha, because Natasha could break his neck. Anyway, he was a bit too busy to micro manage at the moment.

"Don't get de-juiced again," she says, but it's snippier than a concerned warning. It's almost like she knows he's criticizing her inside his head. Natasha might have a truly stupid idealistic fantasy life, but she still scares the crap out of him when she's in a mood to.

"It's not like I meant for that to happen," Tony snaps back, but she has a point. He's not sure how the critter did it the first time, but he's not going to let it try again. He keeps his distance.

"Heads up," Steve says, and the new threat isn't the creature or even a new creature. It's uniformed personnel--SHIELD and military--arriving even later than the news choppers and that's either embarrassing for them or admirable of the media.

" _Shit_ ," Tony says--because either way it's not good for Clint--and disengages to find him.

\----

Clint, the picture of emotional stability, is huddled between two cars. Or rather, between an SUV and a box van--a rent-to-move type of deal, decals and phone number plastered across it's side--his striped back hunched. It's like he's the target of one of those safari hunts, wedged pathetically with his back to a support beam and bristling at the sound of the choppers. The way his eyes roll as one passes directly over the parking structure is all cornered animal, wild and panicked.

"Aw, _fuck_ ," Tony says and he's already thinking of what heart-rending story Clint will feel obliged to share with him because of this. "Come on, Barton. Get a grip. I left a fight with a shark mutant to be here." Or whatever the thing was supposed to be.

He's got a new understanding of Clint's freakout in the woods, because the proximity of the choppers is giving _him_ a panic attack in a way that media presence never had before. Now that he knows what discovery meant to Clint. 

"We're not going to let them get you," he promises, thinking. It doesn't take him long, because it never does, and it's maybe half a minute before he finds a car that someone's left a jacket in. Another that has a gym bag.

Clint catches on while he's liberating the cars of their doors and having JARVIS demolish the security camera recordings, and at least he's got it together somewhat, now. He brushes past Tony and hops gracefully into the back of the car he's just broken into, muscles bunching and sliding under his coat. "We are now robbing civilians," Tony tells him, as soon as he's human and getting dressed. "Maybe we should start thinking about getting you an emergency suddenly-I-have-no-clothes kit like Bruce." Clint looks kind of stupid in the mismatched ensemble, but at least he's decent. 

Anyway, it's only temporary. "Where'd you leave your shit? I'll give you a lift." Also, it will save Clint stomping around a destroyed city block in his bare feet.


	12. Chapter 12

SHIELD does more to corral the mutant shark or whatever thing than the Avengers had been managing, and while Tony's pretty glad to have gotten out of it without having his head smashed in--thanks to Clint--Steve seems to be taking it a little personally. Their failure might also be possibly thanks to Clint, because after he'd pounced the thing away from Tony, he was effectively out of commission, and the rest of them operating without their eyes above.

"I deserve a drink," he announces, "for saving Clint." So he'd found Clint an outfit. It totally counted. He could make some joke about clothing and housing Clint, but Clint would probably take it the wrong way and be offended.

"Since when do you need reasons?" Bruce asks. The Hulk had by far been the most useful of them, so Tony lets it slide, but Bruce had better not be expecting freebies all night.

Steve says, "At least everyone is all right," like the rest of them weren't happily following the age old wisdom of you win some, you let SHIELD win some for you and then take the media credit. Steve sounds like he's trying to convince himself, and Clint grins, then maybe remembers that he was supposed to be shooting things and wasn't, or maybe remembers how close he came to being the subject of video documentation. The look turns flat.

"And Clint saved me," Tony goes on, "so drinks for that quarter, too." Clint looks like he needs a drink, anyway.

"JARVIS wiped all the security feeds," Bruce says, quietly, noticing Clint's turn of mood, too, "It should be okay," and Clint looks over at him and nods once. Stiff and pale and maybe even a little shaky and just great. They were back to that now. Again. Clint _really_ needed a drink.

Tony goes to pour a couple.

\-----

Clint stays antsy and glued to the news for days, while pretending he isn't either of those things, and Tony feels a bit guilty for having needed the rescue in the first place, even if Clint could have maybe shot some exploding arrows or something instead, and had gone with the tiger anyway. 

"JARVIS is watching _everything_ ," he reminds Clint, because Clint is looking a little ragged, "So far there's no mention of any jungle predator, and you can bet that's the sort of thing that would be mentioned." It's like he has no faith in the data sorting capabilities of things built by Tony Stark. 

"They don't have to _mention_ it," Clint says, "There's backgrounds, reflections, shadows." Tony forgets sometimes what Clint's training is, that he knows to find things. That he knows how to peer into all the little nooks and crannies. "You think no one's ever caught shifters on camera before? The people who are interested in that sort of thing--" He shrugs, trailing off. 

The way Clint says _interested_ makes it sound like he's talking about antique pottery or ethnic rugs. The _that sort of thing_ Tony isn't even going to touch. "Then JARVIS can scan the video itself. Image recognition is a thing, you know, Barton."

Clint sinks even further into the couch, shoulders hunched, ignoring him. He's watching the television in split screen, a dozen little divisions. He has the sound muted, and the crawl on each box is too tiny to read, but he looks riveted. Or wearily focused, rather.

"Even you can't see anything when you make everything that tiny," Tony tells him, "And you can't watch enough TV to come even close to JARVIS. This is a waste of time." And then there's the internet. He doesn't mention it, in case it sends Clint entirely over the brink. "Unless you're doing some kind of sick self-comfort thing where every time they go to commercial break without making an urban jungle pun, you feel better."

Clint snorts, but Tony's hit the nail on the head. He can tell by the way Clint slides still further down the cushions.

"Clint's watching game tape," Tony announces, when Steve comes in, dressed like he's coming from the gym, or going there, and looking like he really doesn't want to rehash their mutant shark combat technique failures until the next training session. He casts a glance at the screen, and looks confused.

"It's the news," he says, nonplussed. 

"It's _all_ the news," Tony says. It isn't really. Tony has like a hundred channels of news. Maybe two hundred. And he's not really sure why, because he has anything relevant or interesting sent directly to whatever computer he happens to be nearest to, pretty much as soon as it happens. This sitting and waiting for stale editorializing is more of a Steve kind of thing.

And apparently a Clint kind of thing.

Steve looks at the screen and at Clint and back at the screen again. "You're an Avenger, Clint," he says, and goes over to drop on to the couch next to him. Clint glances away from the television. 

"Yeah," he says, and Tony' first thought is _so get a damn grip_ , but Clint isn't taking it as an admonition. He's at least stopped freaking out about _them_ \--at them, over them, whatever--but he doesn't seem to be reassured by it, either. Steve shifts a bit on the couch so he's--not exactly facing Clint, but kind of angled so he's not really facing the television, either. 

"Is somebody _looking_ for you?" he asks.

Clint doesn't answer right away. Instead, he fumbles with the remote, and looks kind of lost. The expression makes him look young, or maybe it's just a young expression. Like maybe Clint had made that same face when he was twelve or thirteen or whatever and trying to explain to himself how it was possible that he was suddenly feline and striped.

"Maybe," he starts and ducks his head to examine the remote buttons, "Barney. He knows I'm--" Clint doesn't finish, but he doesn't really need to. Alive, out, free, still a part-time tiger. Any of those would probably do. Maybe all of those.

Or maybe, Tony thinks, it's the face Clint had made when this Barney had decided he was worth more in cash than as a brother. When he had found, unexpectedly and without warning, that he was property instead of a person. 

"I saw him once," Clint's going on, "After the fi--after I got out." Tony notes that aborted word. It's like the story is a nesting doll of horrors. Every time Clint clears one thing up, there's something else hidden inside. 

Cap says, "And you think he'd come after you?"

Clint shrugs, "I think he's still into get rich quick schemes and getting into trouble with the wrong people." Which is the pattern Clint had followed himself, for a while, at least according to files that Tony finds now are woefully inaccurate and barely worth the fifteen seconds it had taken him to hack them. Twenty seconds. Twenty four, tops.

It was still time robbery. There was a lot he could have gotten done in twenty four seconds.

"I don't know," Clint says, "I'm still. Shifters are worth a lot of money." He says it softly, like he's embarrassed to say it in front of Tony or in Tony's tower, where the rug is maybe worth four of him. Or maybe not, because Tony has a lot of fancy toys and Pepper's installed a lot of fancy interior decoration, but neither of those collections include a shapeshifter. 

"I couldn't kill him," Clint whispers, and there's a confessional tone to it that Tony can't quite untangle. Either Clint feels bad that he'd failed, or guilty that he'd tried, or sick that he'd wanted to, and in Tony's book all of those were justified as hell. Except maybe the failure, because he couldn't see himself letting anyone live who had done to him what Barney had done to Clint. But then, he'd never had a brother either, unless he counted Rhodey and that was sort of different. 

"He told me he was glad to see me. That he was happy I was okay," Clint goes on and yeah. Tony just bets he was. Clint looks like he hadn't bought it, either, and good for him and his angry suspicions. At least in that one case. "And I just. I knew if I didn't kill him he'd always be out there, but I couldn't."

Steve's face is a mess of sympathetic pain, smoothed out into forced calm. It's really transparent, but Tony doesn't say so. Instead he takes the remote from Clint and mutes the TV and Clint lets him. 

Says, "Barney didn't sell me to the lab, you know. He was. He wasn't _that_ bad," and no wonder Clint and Thor got on so fucking well, with their brother evil deeds blinders on so tight. Or at least their brother evil deeds rationalizations goggles 

\-----

Barney _hadn't_ sold him to the lab. Barney had sold him as a pet, and maybe that wasn't much better, ethics-wise, but there was food and space and tended yards and for the first time in a long time there was proper schooling. Or proper _home schooling_ , at least, because shifter pets couldn't exactly go to a real school where they might talk and bring CPS down on their master's heads. 

Or someone else. Someone who knew about things like kids who turned into birds and tiger and foxes.

He couldn't kill Barney because it wasn't really all Barney's fault. Barney, when he'd seen him again, that one time after, had pointed out that he'd gotten Clint a pretty cushy gig--nothing to do but lay around all day and look fancy and well fed, while Barney'd had to work and scrape and take over the big animal poop shoveling job Clint had left behind.

_Barney_ had gotten him a cushy gig on a rich man's estate. Clint was the one who had fucked it up. _Clint_ was the one who'd had to be hyper and excitable and unaware of his own size.

It had been an accident, that bowling over his keeper, but it had been Clint's own doing.

\-----

"You got sold to the lab because you butt-checked your keeper?" There's a story Tony hadn't thought he'd ever have to summarize. 

"Your _keeper_?" Steve echoes, sounding pained. Clint glances over and gives him a little smile, like he's reassuring Steve. It makes Steve put on his brave-face--the one that Tony suspects he'd perfected when he was puny and sickly and getting beat up a lot. It has that I'm-big-on-the-inside quality about it that just hurts to look at. 

"You think that's bad? I got sold to _them_ because my brother had a get rich quick scheme he funded by borrowing money from the mafia." Clint's got his I'm-too-cool-for-trauma snarky tone back, probably encouraged by the fact that he's kind of freaking Steve out.

"I think you're making parts of this up," Tony says. Clint looks at him. 

"Okay," he allows, "The mafia part. I don't know who he borrowed money from. I mean. How would I know, right?"

"How--How _old_ were you?" Steve's brave-face is so very, very brave. 

Clint says, "Dunno, Cap. Too old to be cute, young enough that I was still growing?" He looks away. Shrugs. 

"Nobody is going to get you, Barton." Tony feels like he's said it a million times, and like it should be sinking in by now. It's not like they don't have a top-notch security system, or like Clint isn't himself top notch security, though maybe not exactly a system unless one added in the rest of the team. Which Tony did, because he wasn't about to leave himself out of his own equation.

"Barney's not even a good criminal," Clint says, as if in agreement. There's a braggy edge of _I was way better_ in there, but Tony's willing to let the sibling rivalry discussion be a Clint Thor thing, assuming it ever even came up. 

Steve's probably equally out of his depth, because he also lets it pass. Instead he stays sitting there in silence, while Clint--agreement with Tony or not--continues to watch the news flicker silently by on multiple channels until he falls asleep.


	13. Chapter 13

Clint pretends to stop watching the news, but Tony's not stupid. He can tell that his conversation with Clint's made progress, if one would call it that, because Clint's now secretly watching JARVIS watch the news. And alright, maybe that isn't the progress Tony intended, but it's at least better resource management.

There's still a fit of panic lurking in there, just under the surface. Any little thing could probably send Clint into a tail-spin at this point and maybe it would be good for him--better anyway than pretending he was fine, then escaping into fox-form to manipulate pats out of Thor.

Not that Thor needed manipulation. The ridiculousness bleed-over was still bleeding over. Thor absently ruffles Clint hair when he passes by him, the way any of them would the fox's big ears, but it seems awkward when Clint is Clint-shape, and even Clint rolls his eyes at it, but in a totally disingenuous way. 

What Tony's learned so far from this whole I-am-all-the-animals thing is that it's impossible to calm Clint down once he's got his heart set on being freaked out, and Thor's weirdly familiar handsiness doesn't do any more to shake Clint out of it than Steve and Tony's reassurances had.

"Anyway," Tony says, bringing Clint sports drink at the range downstairs because Clint doesn't do coffee when he's practicing. It's not the same, maybe, because hadn't made or brewed anything, but it's close enough.

"Anyway what?" 

It's a little unfair that Clint expects Tony to know which conversation he's decided to pick back up hours or even days later, when he can't do the same. Even when the whole expected kidnapping paranoia is really the only topic left hanging in the air. 

"Anyway, you're still here, and JARVIS hasn't found anything, and you can stop hiding out here and shooting all night." It's Clint's new thing to shoot the way Tony builds, not sleeping until he crashes. He's not as good at it as Tony. Hasn't built up the expertise to live that way as a sustained lifestyle. He's looking more than a little ragged. "And anyway, you're freaking Bruce out." 

He's not. He's worrying Bruce, and that's not the same thing, but Tony's not above a little exaggeration if that's what it takes.

Clint lowers his bow and frowns and Tony holds the drink out to him, but Clint doesn't take it. Just blinks at it--suspicious or half asleep--until Tony carefully eases the bow out of his hand and presses the bottle into his palm instead. "Do you think someone's going to scale the tower and break in through your window or something?"

Clint grins, but not like he's amused. More like he's got no idea _what_ he thinks and doesn't know what facial expression to make. A little bit like he's been awake for most of three days and obsessively checking Tony's computers while thinking Tony wouldn't notice.

"No, I--"

Tony cuts him off. "Drink," he says, and makes an impatient gesture at the bottle Clint's still holding capped in his hand. He's been here for hours and there's no sign of water or anything to drink other than what Tony's brought. Clint glares, but he twists the cap off the bottle and downs half of it in one go. 

He'd put Clint to bed, because that's what this channeling Pepper thing is telling him he _should_ do, but he doubts Clint would sleep. Maybe would stare at the ceiling for awhile and then slip back out to the range, the way Tony would slip back to the lab.

"You said you knew," Clint says, watching the bow in Tony's hand, following it

"What?" And okay, he's failing the random continued conversations thing too tonight.

"In the woods--"

"Forest."

"In the forest," Clint allows, but rolls his eyes, "you said you'd heard of people." 

That's a bit far back to be playing connect the conversation, but Tony remembers saying _you people_ , if not anything else he'd babbled when Clint had spontaneously become a big cat and bitten off a robot's head. 

"Heard of, yeah," Tony admits. It doesn't mean anything, except in so far as every single thing about the shifting business means something to Clint. Like every word and suggestion and observation plays over in his head until he's convinced himself it's out to get him. 

"Not like Steve," Tony goes on, and Clint's eyes follow the bow as Tony shifts it to his other hand, "I never _met_ anyone. It was just a--"

"A millionaire thing?" Clint has the bottle capped again and is flipping it to himself one-handed, the remainder of the drink sloshing on impact every time he catches it again. 

"Billionaire," Tony corrects, but doesn't point out the going rate of the average Quinjet. "It was just a showoff rumor. John so-and-so has a previously unidentified Rembrant, and some tacky shithead has a rhino person or whatever." It was a believe-unbelieve situation. Like cropcircles. Clint probably wouldn't appreciate the comparison, but mostly because Clint didn't appreciate _any_ of Tony's comparisons.

Clint flips the bottle a bit too hard and it bounces off the heel of his hand and falls, then rolls away.

"You're better at throwing, huh?" Tony says, and waves the bow at him, "No wonder you're into this and not team sports."

"I play team sports," Clint says, a little peevishly, but probably because he thinks teaching Thor how to play horse counts.

"Ha," Tony says, "that's a joke you should tell Steve," and even as a dig for the sake of bugging Clint it's not fair. Not when Clint's whole cycle of panic and freaking out was because he'd bothered to save Tony. Twice. 

He actually feels a bit bad for having said it, and covers the fact by retrieving Clint's drink, tossing the bottle back to him in a slow, exaggerated underhand lob. 

"Fuck you," Clint says, and catches it easily, one handed.

\-----

He's not sure if Clint goes to bed after that, but he doesn't come to the lab because it's Steve who comes slinking in later that night, or early the next morning, depending on what parameters one was measuring by. 

"Oh great," Tony says, "If you're joining the Bruce and Clint club of horrifying stories I'm kicking all three of you out of my tower. It'll be me and Thor and Natasha, and no one ever knows what's going on in _his_ stories, and Natasha doesn't _tell_ stories," except recently, but they're all cutesy anecdotes, or melancholy-by-implication at worst, so Tony can deal, "and neither of them ever come down here and it'll be great."

Steve gives him a worried, measuring look and Tony sighs and sits back from his work table. "Never mind," he says, "But if you're here to tell me terrifying things, then you have to bring me offerings." 

"I could get you a sandwich?" Steve offers, in that slightly confused voice he uses when he's not quite sure what Tony's talking about and is going with the last sentence he actually caught. Tony waves him off. It was really more of a Clint and trauma thing. It just wouldn't be the same with Steve.

"What's on your mind, Cap?" Tony asks, and goes back to work.

"You don't think--" Steve starts, then looks back the way he'd come, like he thinks he might have been followed, before turning back to Tony, "You don't think someone's _really_ going to come after Clint, do you?"

"You're asking me because I'm rich, aren't you? You think there's like a rich people hive mind, or something."

"I'm asking you because Clint _talks to you_ ," Steve says, and huh. Clint does. Tony hadn't really thought about it exactly in those terms. More in _oh god what is Clint going to tell me now_ terms. 

But that made it sound like he didn't want to know. Like he wanted Clint to keep it all to himself, the way he had before, which wasn't true, either. What he wanted was for those thing to not have happened to Clint. For Clint to not be a shifter, or for his brother to not be an asshole, or for his _keeper_ to not have been such a delicate fuck that Clint had been considered a safety hazard.

Or for someone to have considered the hazards to _Clint's_ safety before he'd been sold off and tortured and had a fucking eye removed under nothing but a local. 

"I don't know," he says, because he doesn't. Because it doesn't seem like they'd considered Clint to be worth all that much trouble, judging by how they had treated him. But then, who the hell knew what people who would buy and sell and experiment on kids would and wouldn't do. 

Their head wasn't exactly the kind of place Tony wanted to climb into.

\-----

More to the point, maybe, is that _Clint_ thinks someone might be after him. Or not 'thinks', so much, because that seems like a tall order for Clint, at least at the moment. It really seems a lot more like Clint can't shake his sense of being hunted, no matter how much sense it doesn't make.

"Were you always this unstable, and we just didn't notice?" Tony asks, the next time he tries to drag Clint from the range in the small hours of the morning, which was normally the timeslot for someone to try to drag _him_ from the lab. Clint is kind of usurping his place in the team homelife.

Clint doesn't bother to so much as glance away from the target, but the way the arrows thud into it is just as emphatic as one of Steve's _looks_. Tony frowns. Clint nocks another arrow, still without looking at him, and draws. Releases. Tony watches him go through the whole thing again--loading tension into his back and shoulders, then relaxing, by turns. Over and over.

It was always a little hard to reconcile the brash, impatient Barton with the Barton who could cycle through the same repetitive motion for hours with the same intent focus at the end as at the beginning. Clint doesn't really have the sort of personality most people associated with the honing of a complex, somewhat anachronistic craft. 

Tony lets him get to the end of the quiver, then goes to collect Clint's arrows. Not so much to be helpful, but so he can confiscate them and Clint scowls when he refuses to hand them over, but doesn't protest. He probably has more arrows, but that's not the point. The point is to _make_ the point. 

And Tony's not sure what that point is, but he seems to have made it successfully, because Clint's at least looking at him now, even if it is with an unamused, pissed off expression. 

"Healthy coping methods, Barton," Tony says, and can't believe these words are coming out of his mouth, "you need to learn some."

\-----

Clint seems to. Or at least, he goes back to faking it, and back to sleeping at night, and stops looking quite so hunted and like he thinks any minute now there's going to a security breach at the zoo.

And then there is. 

Or are. Because it happens twice.


	14. Chapter 14

The first isn't so bad. Not by Tony's standards, because it mostly involves Rhodey arriving unannounced while Clint is being stupid with Thor, chasing Natasha's ping pong ball all over the common area like a hyperactive house cat.

Thor probably prefers the wrestleability of the tiger, but Tony can tell Clint prefers to not upset the furniture while he's dodging around. And Tony would appreciate the caution, except he still remembers Clint's _in the lab you had to careful_. It makes him sort of want to pet the stupid fox, even though he also sort of wants to lock Clint in the bathroom until he settles the hell down.

Clint's just hopped off the couch with the stupid ball crammed in his jaws, when the elevator pings and Rhodey steps out, mid-tirade. Tony has a vague memory of scheduling something, but he probably wasn't paying attention at the time because he can't quite put his finger on what it was about. He probably forgot to fill Pep in, too, because there's been no reminders.

At the entry, Clint assumes what could only be described as a defensive stance and Rhodey just sort of stops mid-word and looks at him.

Even four footed and furred, Clint looks distinctly uncomfortable, because even though he's an animal, he's also an assassin who has his mouth full of pink and white ping pong ball. Or maybe because he knows the Chihuakita thing isn't going to work on Rhodey, who's witnessed enough of Tony's attempts to nurture another living creature--or plant--to know that if he actually had a dog, it would have been dead maybe two weekends ago.

Also, that Pepper would never let him have a dog.

"Rhodey," Tony says, casually, "How's it going? Did we have a thing, and did I stand you up for it?" Rhodey gives him a suspicious look while Clint makes himself scarce, backing wary-but-casually out of the room, leaving the ball to bounce twice then roll under a cabinet.

"That was a really strange reaction for a dog," Rhodey says, like maybe he thinks Tony's moved on to altering the natural world as well as the mechanical one. Like he's Bruce or something.

"He's kind of more Nat and Thor's," Tony says, because that was a reasonable explanation for any weird behavior, really.

"Uh-huh," Rhodey says, but his face is full of _what are you up to now, Stark?_

\-----

It's not that bad by Tony's standards, and Tony thinks he could drag the Clint-standard over to the Tony-standard given enough time and late nights in the lab or on the range. It's been working so far, anyway.

"Didn't realize people not on the team could get in," Clint says when Tony finishes getting rid of Rhodey--which he feels marginally guilty about, after forgetting they had a meeting, and not even forgetting because of Avenger business--and goes to find him. He's on the gun range instead of the archery one, so it takes Tony longer to locate him than usual.

Tony doesn't say _Oh please, it's just Rhodey_ , because Clint may have worked with Rhodey once or twice, but he really has no reason to trust him the way Tony does. "He thinks I'm building a cyborg dog army or something," he says instead, to let Clint know that Rhodey may have whacked-out suspicions, but they're still hitting wide of the whacked-out reality by a long shot, "if it helps."

"That does help," Clint says, but it sounds dry and sarcastic and like he can't imagine what train of logic Tony is riding that he thinks that _cyborg dog army_ is anything close to comforting.

"He doesn't think I could be a genuine dog person. Well. Living thing person." It's really kind of depressing that his best friend in the whole world thinks that his affinity for nurturing life is just below that of some kind of scourge. "Maybe," Tony suggests, "Maybe you should stop playing Asgardian house pet with Thor."

Clint gives him a look. He doesn't have any safety gear on. No glasses, no ear protection. It's at the same time uncharacteristic and yet unsurprising. He puts the handgun he's been firing--Tony assumes. He's mostly just been holding it since Tony got here--and says, "Yeah."

It takes Tony a minute to catch up with that, because he's all about accidentally picking pointless fights with Clint. Agreement is the last thing he expects. "What?" 

"Yeah," Clint repeats and picks the gun back up to unload it and pull the clip out, "Maybe."

And not because he's _dying_ to tell Rhodey, Tony says, "Rhodes isn't a bad guy, Clint. I will swear him to secrecy about the strange dog behavior he's witnessed on the premises. But then I have to fill him in, because if I swear him to secrecy and don't tell him why, then he really might call the ASPCA on me. Or on Bruce. I might be able to pass the blame. But the point is--"

Clint lets his breath out in a huff and all of a sudden he looks as tired again as he had when Tony had pulled him off the range in the early hours of the morning. "No. You're right. It's--" and then his face goes hard and determined and he flashes Tony a grin. It's not strained exactly, but it's got no laugh in it either. "Go ahead. Tell him. I told Cap I trust the team, but--" Clint shrugs, "It's the tower, right?" and then, sardonically, "What could possibly go wrong?"

A part of Tony's brain is already rehearsing, _Oh my god Rhodey, and then he was a tiger_ , but at the same time he can't help but feel like he's bullying Clint into it. "Hey, it's your secret, Barton. Don't let me take it over." 

"This stuff's going to keep happening," Clint says, sounding somewhere between fierce and resigned, "Maybe I should be getting the jump on it."

It was better than Clint's more usual habit of trying to go back in time and hide the whole thing again, so Tony clapped him on the shoulder and engaged in some self restraint. "Think about it first, okay? Rhodey can stew over what he thinks I'm up to for a while. Be warned Pep might start showing up, because she doesn't think I can keep goldfish alive either without someone to supervise how many pinches of fish flakes I feed them."

This time Clint's grin is genuine, "This is a thing that really happened isn't it?"

"Laugh it up, Barton. You know she's going to panic if she pours you kibble and you don't eat it, and then it'll be off to the vet with you to make sure I haven't poisoned the dog. If I were you? I'd start choosing a brand."

\-----

And the whole I-am-actually-considering-an-approach-other-than-blind-panic thing is such an improvement that when the second security breach happens, the first thing Tony does is try to cover it up.

The second thing he does is change his mind and find Cap so he can rant at him.

"There _is_ a rich people hive mind," he yells, storming into the gym in what is not non-marking rubber soles, stomping right across the wood and throwing his arms around like it's all Steve's fault and _how could he_. 

Steve stops what he's doing and stills the bag he's been giving a beating so he can give Tony and his out-of-place suit a still, even look that's a little like Bruce's sardonic raised eyebrow. "What?"

"You were right. You were right the whole time," he tells Steve, and gives the bag a punch. Bad idea. It didn't even look as angry as he felt. Or as panicked. He wasn't sure there was such a thing a panicked punch, but it hurts his hand just the same. 

"What the hell are you talking about, Tony?" Steve sounds like he's a bit scared, or maybe worried, so Tony reels it in a little.

"They think," he says, pronouncing each word carefully, if not slowly, "they think that I _own_ Clint."

"Who does? What happened? What's going on?" 

"I don't know what's going on. And don't tell Clint."

"Tell him _what_? Slow down, Tony."

Tony takes a breath, and does, "Somebody knows--" he stops to consider how to phrase it, "Somebody knows that we have a shifter _around_ ," he says that last to avoid the have-own connotation. It makes him a bit sick, but he's not sure why, because it's not _true_ , "and they think that he's mine."

Steve frowns a bit, then says, "The Avengers aren't exactly low-profile--"

"I don't know if they know it's Clint," Tony interrupts, "who knows what they saw. So don't do anything that will give it away."

"You have to tell Clint, Tony."

"No, I don't. And don't make me regret telling you." He wouldn't have, but he needs another set of eyes on Clint, another person to be aware that someone might be gunning for him. "it could be nothing, and Clint will _lose it_."

"Tony," Steve starts, and Tony waves him to silence. His head is filled with Clint and his stupid I-can-run-away-at-any-second shtick--his clomping around in boots in the middle of the night, his attempt to drop them like so much garbage and bolt--and his fucked-up visits to the lab to tell Tony _I was awake when they took the eye_. Jesus Christ.

It was bad enough without Bruce's _they would have put him down_. Bruce just had to be the fucking icing on the cake.

"Not till we know more. Just help me keep an eye on him in the meantime, okay?"

"Help you? I'm pretty sure that's part of my job anyway." Steve sounds annoyed. Maybe a bit offended at the suggestion that he might do otherwise, even though Tony hadn't meant it that way at all. 

"Alright. Fine," Tony says, and Steve says, "Tell me what happened," and goes to gather his things--a towel, a bottle of water. Steve is way more organized about his workouts than Clint.

"Nothing yet. I have an--" not an email. JARVIS could have traced that in no time. "I have a paper mail." He pulls it out of his pocket. It's folded up and stashed in a ziploc bag, but more to protect it from how Tony wants to rip it to shreds, and then burn it. He's pretty sure they wont get anything useful from it. It'll either be clean or contaminated by _everything_. People who buy and sell people have a tendency to know how to cover their tracks, and in this case, he's sure they've used every trick in the book. It's no secret, after all, that Tony Stark is an Avenger, even if they think he's an Avenger who secretly owns another human being and might not be averse to negotiating a price.

"They made me an _offer_ ," he says, and drops the whole thing into Steve's hand.

Steve looks at it, frowning at the thick, cream colored paper. The elegant writing. It's so incredibly fucked up. 

"Why would anyone think you would ever--"

"Because he's _here_. Because they have no fucking clue why else he would be if he wasn't my goddamn _lawn ornament_." Steve looks like he wants to ask questions, and Tony has no idea what they are but he cuts off the possibility with, "No, I don't know if that's actually what they had him for. I try not to look at it too closely."

There was no point anyway. If it was awful, it was probably next on Clint's overshare masterlist.

Steve says, "Okay. But I'm not keeping this from him indefinitely. If I think he needs to know, if I think there's _any_ safety risk--"

"Yeah, yeah. Sure." It wasn't like Tony wanted to put Clint in danger. He wanted Clint to stay _out_ of danger, and that included preventing him staging another escape. "But if you decide you need to tell him, _you_ make sure he doesn't run. Because you know he'll probably try to."

"We talked him down the first time," Steve says, and Tony snorts.

"You're an optimist, Steve. I like that about you."


	15. Chapter 15

_Of course_ Pepper shows up, with her arms full of dog gear, because the woman has _no faith_ in him, and because Rhodey is a giant blabber mouth. Tony sort of hates that they've teamed up to make sure he feeds himself and doesn't die of avoidable causes, because that means that they talk. To each other. Without consulting him first about what he may or not consider no one else's damn business.

He wishes there was a way to magnetically charge them to the same polarity so they'd repel each other and let him continue to feed his fancy new dog people food. Well, his unique blend mongrel dog, anyway.

Pepper strides in as announced as Rhodey--and now that Clint's paying attention, he's probably quietly freaking out about what Tony has so far considered acceptable security parameters--just as Clint's about to walk in. 

Tony manages to block him and shove him into a different room, hissing "Fox! Fox! She's going to ask about it and it'll be weird if you have to leave, then don't come back." 

"Goddammit," Clint hisses, and he looks unhappy as hell about it. 

"Come on. It'll be fine. Pep loves fluffy things. She'll be thrilled." Then, "Move it, Barton." He gives Clint another shove, not to push him anywhere, but just to hurry him along. He can almost hear Clint's heart thumping, his pulse jackrabbit fast under Tony's hand.

"Well, you little dogs are always the nervous type," he says, "Yip a little and she won't notice a thing."

Clint gives him a dirty look. Only Clint would think he could pull off fuzzy adorable and badass at the same time and resent the implication that he couldn't. But then, Clint could pull off fuzzy adorable and _snippy_ , because after he shrinks to a ball of fluff and wriggles out of his clothes, he makes a series of short, high barks and if Tony's ever wondered what canine sarcasm looked like, he has a fair idea now.

He kicks Clint's clothing--boots and all--behind a bureau, out of sight, then says, "Ready to meet your adoring public of one? Because Pep _will_ adore you. To pieces, maybe. There's a pet shelter fund drive that I think she might actually be banned from."

Clint snorts, and sounds like himself. It's not really cute at all. Clint's getting kind of a fat head about just how much attitude his fox-self can get away with on the basis of being small and having ridiculously big ears. 

"You should fetch her the ping pong ball. Rhodey thought that was _charming_." Rhodey, who he has tentative permission to tell about the whole shifty changy thing. Clint hasn't gotten back to him on that count yet, and Tony's not sure he can or should push when he has that letter burning holes in his brain. 

Clint could possibly deal with both of those things, but probably not at the same time. 

Probably not with Pepper coming around to try to feed him rawhide bones. 

Clint lifts his lip a little in response to the Rhodey ping pong ball dig, exposing the point of one sharp tooth, and sits to give his ear a good scratch. There's something about the motion that's disdainful and puts Tony in mind of a rude gesture, and leave it to Clint to come up with a foxy flip-off. 

"It'll be fine," Tony says, serious, "It's just Pepper." Clint might want to keep the ridiculous antics down to a minimum, though, in case Pep ever makes it to his list of confidential information insiders and he wants to maintain even a scrap of assassin secret agent dignity with her. 

"Oh my god," Pepper breathes, when Tony wanders into the kitchen with a totally convincing casual stroll and Clint pads after, not bouncing quite as much as when he's trying to be an obnoxious pain in the ass. "He's so cute."

Natasha beams and when Clint's close enough, scoops him up and hands him to Pepper. Tony can tell Clint wasn't expecting that. Being picked up by Natasha, sure. He's been her fashion accessory enough times by now to be used to it, but the change of hands makes him struggle in short bursts, like he's torn between escape and fear of being dropped.

"Hi puppy," Pepper coos and Tony tries not to enjoy Clint's panic. If Pep kisses his nose, Clint's just going to die of mortification, and it's hilarious how the whole tiny fox house pet thing is alright so long as Clint's the one spinning out the ridiculousness. Clint seems less inclined to enjoy it when it's coming from an outside source. 

The karma of fucking with people, Tony thinks, is that eventually your bullshit becomes real. Clint can fucking _stew in it_. 

It's all kind of meanly satisfying, but generally not any worse than any number of bizarre things that go down in their kitchen until Pepper says, "What's his name?" 

They freeze for too long. _That_ part of the cover had completely slipped through the cracks, and Tony blames Natasha, because aliases and secret identities are _clearly_ not his thing, while everyone knows she secret spies a bunch every other week. "Well, Pep," he starts, a little less than smoothly, and Pepper gives him a disbelieving look.

"You've just been calling him 'dog', haven't you?" She asks, full of accusation. How dare he not name his dog. Of course Pepper would be horrified. 

"He's really more Nat and Thor's," Tony says, and makes the poor tactical decision of glancing at Thor as he says it.

Thor, who looks confused by the whole thing. "His name?" Thor says, "Of course his name is still--"

"Francis," Natasha puts in. Then smiles smoothly and stirs more sugar into her coffee, "His name is Francis." 

Clint growls and Pepper wrinkles her nose. "That's not a dog name."

"I liked Noodles," Tony suggests, and Clint's growl is even deeper and more threatening. As threatening as a ball of gray and orange fluff can manage, anyway. 

Thor says, "Why must we give a new name to Haw--" but Natasha kicks him without even changing facial expression. Tony's a bit surprised that Thor even feels it, let alone that he shuts up at it.

"Francis," Natasha repeats firmly, and Tony is suddenly sure that she's mentally naming the tiger and the lion she hasn't even seen as well. 

\-----

"I don't like this people sopping over you just because you're fluffy," he tells Clint later, when Clint comes to hang in the lab, still without any offerings of food or coffee, "It's unfair."

"As unfair as people sopping over you because you're disgustingly wealthy?" Clint says, and okay. Kind of mean. There's _lots_ of reasons for people to sop over Tony that have nothing to do with money. Good looks and charm being right up there. He doesn't say so to Clint, who doesn't look like he's in a mood to agree with anyone on anything at the moment.

"You okay there, Barton?" Tony asks instead, as Clint hops up to take a seat on the end of his desk as usual. There's like a dozen other chairs in the lab, most of them more comfortable than perching on the end of what may as well be a work bench. But then Clint couldn't swing one leg like a kid, and peer down at Tony's keyboard like he's recording the keystrokes.

"Sure," Clint says. Then, "Francis. Why would she do that to me?"

The thing with Natasha was, it was impossible to tell sometimes if she was being sweet or mean. But considering the whole deal involved Clint, Tony thinks it's probably safe to bet on the side of sweet-with-accidental-barbs. 

"I have suggestions I can run by her," Tony offers, "if you want. I've named _tons_ of things. Butterfingers, Dum-E--"

"Yeah. Thanks, but no thanks." 

He lets Clint sit there for a while, but it doesn't seem like Clint's there for any purpose, so eventually he asks, "Let me ask you something."

Clint stills. Looks suspicious. But then he shrugs and says, "Alright. Shoot."

"When you were a kid," Tony starts, cautiously, because that's a risky opening gambit with any of them. Even with Thor and Steve whose early lives tended a little bit more towards normal. Comparatively speaking. Once one took certain things into account.

Clint twitches, and his mouth pulls into what may have been the start of a frown, but then his expression smooths out again, and he says, "Yeah?"

"You--I want to know about the rich guy." The guy who sold Clint to the lab, for being a kid and making a kid mistake. Clint's probably had the same thought, maybe with a touch of remembered panic, because his eyes go to the floor and he does that overly still thing he does when threatened. When he thinks his sniper nest is about to be compromised. There's not really any shadows to melt into on Tony's desk, so it's not as tactically effective as in the field. Tony pats his leg.

"You don't have to," he says, "Forget it."

Clint's stillness changes. Going non-threatening instead of threatened, his eyes drifting from the floor to Tony's hand on his thigh. Tony pulls it back. "What do you want to know?" Clint asks, and swings his leg again, going back to his regular self like he's flipped a switch. 

Tony's not sure what he's asking about, what he's looking for. Something. Anything. Whatever might help him find the end of the thread that led to him getting a fucking letter inquiring whether or not he was accepting offers for Clint. 

He couldn't really tell Clint what kind of information he was looking for without also telling Clint _why_ he was looking for it.

"He had a big lawn," Clint offers, even though Tony doesn't answer. "Huge. I had the feeling it was out in the country, but I don't know why I thought so. Maybe--you don't really see yards like that in the city."

"Estates," Tony corrects, "Estates like that."

"Yeah." Clint scratches his jaw, then goes back to watching his right foot swing, "I don't know where it was. I came in a box car, and I left in a box car."

Of course. One didn't transport illegally trafficked things out in the open, after all. Not when those things might turn into deer or elk or god knew what in a bid to escape.

"It wasn't that bad a gig," Clint says, softly, "A lot cushier than working for the circus." There's a guilty note to it. Like Clint feels bad for making them think it was awful to be kept as a pet. Tony knows where it's coming from, and yeah, lounging around might beat shoveling giant cat turds in some ways, but Tony would take tiger shit long before he'd take being a prisoner. "Barney said--"

"Your brother is a _shit_ ," Tony says and doesn't mean it to come out snapped the way it does. Who the hell guilt trips a _kid_ for not appreciating being _sold_? He can't really believe how tied up in knots over it Clint still is, but then, he doesn't think Clint's ever put any thought into untangling the whole thing before. He thinks Clint's probably shied away from thinking about it at all until now.

"I had lessons," Clint says, and smiles, then adds, "English and stuff, Tony," when Tony starts to scream in his head and it probably shows on his face. "Like regular school, sort of. I guess--We were supposed to be 'conversant'," Clint says and rolls his eyes, "Whatever that means."

Tony knows what that means. It's how the slimier of the too-rich-for-morals crowd describe their latest arm candy-- _She's young and pretty and so conversant, on -all kinds- of topics_. The screaming in his head starts up again.

"Alright," he says to Clint, "It's okay," even though Clint doesn't look particularly upset. 

"Tony?"

"Never mind. Just--shut up a minute."

Clint peers worriedly down at him, then slides off the desk to get a closer look. "Jesus. You look like shit. When was the last time you ate something? Don't move, okay? I think Cap had a sandwich in the fridge. I'll steal it for you and be right back."


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For an additional warning for this part, see the end of the chapter.

Tony can't let the _conversant_ thing go, even though he can't make himself draw a line to connect the dots for Clint either, because Clint probably has enough to deal with without thinking about what he might or might not have been being groomed for. Clint, probably, is better off thinking of the whole thing as a shit deal that had the silver lining of a privatized education, so Tony just tucks it into the back of his mind, into the same place that's still turning over the tidy lettering and expensive stationary of the offer to buy his shapeshifter. 

He starts to pay attention to the fact that Clint can mostly follow the general idea of his lab arguments with Bruce--which might be kind of patronizing of him, but still. He'd been taking comprehension as a given when it _should_ had stood out, even if just a little bit--and that he makes faces when Natasha mentions certain books that are definitely not up his for-entertainment personal taste alley, and doesn't even glaze out more or faster than the rest of them when Steve comes back from a walk droning on about architecture and art deco ornamentation and the post modern aesthetic of something or other. 

"You're not really a dummy," he tells Clint when he comes in fox-form to sleep in the in-box again, bushy tail curled over his nose and his ridiculous little feet tucked up underneath him. "And why aren't you guarding the princess Natasha from kidnapping by ninjas or whatever it is this week?" 

Clint looks like doesn't know whether to be offended or laugh, which is a surprisingly complex emotion for a fox-face, especially one half-hidden by tail-fluff. It's a little unnerving. Clint had probably been the creepiest dog on the playground as well as the cutest, which was, actually, kind of fitting if he was trying to pass as Natasha's. Clint eyes him a second longer, then settles on waving his tail a little in what isn't a dog-like gesture at all. It's a sarcastic _thanks for noticing_ move, and then Clint shuts his eyes again, in lazy indifference. Tony frowns.

"Even your tail is a wiseass," he says, and shoves some unopened envelopes into the inbox on top of him. 

\-----

The not letting go of things leads Tony to other things, among them the invasion of what Clint might consider private information, but Tony considers available-for-the-taking data. It's practically public information, if one is Tony Stark, but then what isn't.

"Goddammit," Tony says, as Steve walks in to his lab. It's mostly for effect because Steve, as usual, fails to time his entrance to coincide with Tony's actual eureka moment. "You're going to love this."

Steve looks like he doubts he's going to love anything that's introduced with the word _goddammit_ , but says, "What?" in the way that means he's hoping for the best, but bracing himself for more likely outcomes. 

"Actually," Tony says, "you're going to hate it. In fact, it might make you cry a little. Bruce, though. Bruce might like it. He appreciates this kind of world-is-fucking-with-you twist of fate. Not in an asshole way, I mean. Just because it's weird, and maybe because Bruce is a little damaged." Steve looks like he's running out of patience with the preamble, and also like Tony's dawdling isn't doing much for his apprehension, so Tony cuts to the chase. "I know how they found Clint. And it wasn't through CNN highlights or youtube phone videos, or _Conspiracy: Fact or Fiction, episode Shapeshifter Cover-up_."

"What?" Steve says, again, because why keep up when one can just demand a rehash multiple times. Tony rolls his eyes, and impatiently hits a few keys then waits for the page to print out and snatches it before it even drops to the printer tray, tugging it free as it exits the printer and then holding it out and shaking it a bit to hurry Cap along. Steve says, "How?" even as he takes the sheet, and, "What is this?"

"It's _grades_. It turns out Clint was decent at math, lousy but engaged in history, and passable at English." Steve peers at the paper, then looks from it to Tony. Tony makes a helpless what-can-you-do gesture, holding his palms up and apart before dropping them again. "He had a tutor when he was a--when he was with the rich guy. Whoever he had as a teacher must not have known who--or what, I guess--he was teaching. He was good. He was a pro. Turns out circus-Clint was pretty close to illiterate, but eventually managed to crawl through fucking Tolstoy. I found a _book report_."

Steve frowned at the paper again, "Tony, what are you saying? What's this have to do with any--"

"I'm saying, that Clint had a good teacher who did everything he was supposed to do. Up to and including registering Francis the Cat as _homeschooled_."

Steve blinks, then looks at the paper again. He looks like he might be in pain.

"I know," Tony says, "They found him through his education. It kills me, too."

\-----

"So on the bright side," Tony tells Bruce, still leaving out the part about someone wanting to make the purchase of their friend and teammate, "he's a high school graduate. On the fucked up and stupid side, he _didn't even change his name_."

Bruce shrugs, unperturbed as he measures powders and drips liquids into each other. Tony's tempted to tell him him the whole story just to shake him up a little but then manages not to. "He was a kid," Bruce says, "and--"

"Ah, ah, ah," Tony interrupted, "Barton will get all pissy if you forget that he was an adult by the time they were easing into vivisection." 

Bruce stops what he's doing to give him a look. An unfriendly look, but Bruce's unfriendly looks have nothing on the unfriendliness Tony feels when Clint gets on to his _it wasn't that bad_ or _here's some some stupid excuses I think make sense_ song and dance. "He was a _kid_ ," Bruce repeats slowly, then goes on, "and he was escaping _hell_ , and traumatized and maybe even injured. It probably didn't occur to him. It was probably a lot less immediate than finding food and shelter."

It's not like Clint's the master tactician _now_ when it comes to his own well-being. Coordinating the team from above, yes. Rustling up support and supplies when needed, sure. Keeping his own damn head down, not so much. 

"Anyway," Bruce goes on, "You're one to talk. You managed to keep your name to yourself all of what? Three minutes?" Tony makes a _pff_ sound, because Bruce might have a point, but _fuck him_. Bruce ignores it and just goes on, peering at a measurement line on a small beaker as he does. "And I'm pretty sure SHIELD made him take classes when he joined and that he's taken some since, so don't tell him you've been operating under the assumption that he had a sixth grade education this whole time," Bruce went on, and Tony frowned at him.

"Eighth grade," Tony corrects, "And Barton's two college credits for basket weaving isn't really the point here, _Bruce_. The _point_ is that, for a paranoid secret agent he's left a honking big paper trail and _didn't even know about it_."

"I'm sure his world history final was at the forefront of his mind as some lab monkey was strapping him down to a--um." Bruce can't make himself finish and instead pretends to fuss with a scale, adjusting it back and forth and swearing softly under his breath. Tony doesn't buy it. The equipment in his lab is _not_ flimsy and problematic and if Bruce is going to pretend that Tony would maintain any sort of recalcitrant gadgetry--certain beloved robots aside--even if it's just as cover for having upset himself, then Bruce can take a walk off the rooftop launch ramp.

"I'm insulted," Tony says, and Bruce looks confused then looks at the scale, then makes that soft exasperated snort that more than half of the time is a commentary on Tony's behavior. 

"Tony," he says, like he's starting something, but not an apology.

"Stow it," Tony says, and makes his hands busy with some stuff that is really more up Bruce's alley--chemistry and probably dangerously irradiated, who the hell knew. Maybe he should install a geiger counter in the lab, just in case. Maybe install it in Bruce. Or clip it to his shirt or something.

Bruce puts the scale down to ask, "What are you so upset about? Is it because Clint passing two semesters of biology means he's less likely to be impressed with your rudimentary ornithology?"

"You don't know things, Bruce. You think you know things, but you don't," Tony says, tossing down the tubes and pipettes he'd been fussing with and stalking a circuit to his computer and back before saying, "We. _We_. Oh god, _we_."

"What the hell is wrong with you?" Bruce says, and looks over his test tubes and vials like he thinks something might be leaking and poisoning them. Tony sees him surreptitiously touch his thumbs to each finger tip, testing coordination, then frown when it comes out normal. "Tony?"

"Don't go sticking your tongue out in a mirror just yet. You're fine. I'm fine. You're not hemorrhaging our brains by unleashing deadly fumes just yet. It was--He said ' _we_ were supposed to be conversant', and _you're_ the one that brought up other shifters existing, remember that? And didn't Barton mention some deer kid or something? That they replaced him with, or traded him for, or something?"

"What's going on, Tony?" Bruce sounds scared instead of dry and put upon. It's sort of interesting

"I'm not sure, but I don't think Clint was a one-off luxury item. He was part of a _collection_. Who the fuck has that kind of access to shapeshifters? They're not even-- _You_ only know about them because you're a--had certain lab time adventures. Same for Cap. _I_ thought they were snooty jackass fibs, told out of jealousy over yachts and jets and Grecian urn ware and shit. _How_ , Bruce, do you get multiple versions of a--a--I'm going to say _thing_ for the same of generality. Don't read into it--that no one else is even sure is real, _and_ be able to promptly trade in for a new model when you decide you're not satisfied? Is there some kind of amazing warranty on these guys or something? Because I have an _amazing_ warranty plan on my products, and even I don't do exchanges if you hurt yourself on an _SI_ flying rocket pack by being an idiot."

"You produce rocket packs?"

"What? No. Stay with me here, Bruce. Don't focus on weird things."

Bruce sets his project aside, carefully capping anything that's still open and refrigerating others then comes back and sits down and folds his arms over his chest with a frown on his face. "Do you have a conclusion here, or are you just freaking out over assumptions?"

"Possibly that last thing," Tony says, considering. He _doesn't_ have a conclusion. He has a niggle of an idea and a bad feeling and a need to go see Clint or maybe Cap. Or Clint and then Cap. Or Cap and then Clint. One of those. 

And possibly, he should fill Natasha in, but Natasha was more than likely to tell Clint all the things Tony isn't sure how to break to him yet. He needs a cool, uninvolved head to run the whole thing by. And preferably a head that also has access to information. What he needs is to talk to Rhodey, and to talk to Rhodey he needs Clint's go-ahead, and therefore needs Clint to stay calmed the hell down. And for _that_ , he needs him to stay--for just a little bit longer--out of the loop. 

Which puts a big fat ixnay on the talking to Nat.

"I have to go sweet talk Sir Fox-a-lot," he tells Bruce, who still looks concerned and like he hasn't finished putting together all the pieces Tony's tossed at him. "And for your information, Barton might-- _might_ \--know what a nucleic acid is, but his ornithology _sucks_."

"I don't think you should bring that up with him," Bruce calls, as Tony heads for the door, "again."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Additional warning for this part, and I'm not sure how to succinctly label it, but: Tony's suspicions of rich guy's intentions at the end of part 13--that is, possible future dub/non-con intentions regarding people being kept against their will--are mentioned again and with a bit more focus but not by much.
> 
> It's pretty mild, I think, and not graphic, and _really_ just Tony suspecting away, but just in case you need a heads-up for that sort of thing, it's kind of a point of discussion in this part, for a bit.


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was excited to post this update so I could tell you guys that [Neffie](http://archiveofourown.org/users/originalneffie/pseuds/Neffie) has made a banner for this, and it made me grin all day and you can look at it here:
> 
> http://archiveofourown.org/works/603093
> 
>  
> 
> Also, I'm 'harcourt' on dreamwidth now. It's mostly about fan stuff.

Tony walks into Rhodey's apartment unannounced because it's _Rhodey_ , and he has an emergency key. For emergencies, but really what does and doesn't constitute a desperate enough situation to warrant independent entry is a judgement call. And according to Tony's judgement, this feels really dire.

Dire enough to also warrant pouring himself a drink while he waits and maybe also fixing himself a sandwich. 

He's still rifling through Rhodey's fridge when the man comes home--appearing suddenly around the corner of the hall with his sidearm drawn. 

"Jesus Christ," Tony says, and nearly drops a jar of olives, "What the fuck are you doing? You scared the _hell_ out of me."

"What am _I_ doing?" Rhodey asks, not really incredulously but like he wishes there still things he could put past Tony and _be_ incredulous about. Tony grins. He's about to have his mind _blown_. He's going to have all the incredulity he fucking wants. 

"What are you doing here?" Rhodey demands, like he's not always showing up at Tony's place like the tower is the best fucking treehouse clubhouse whatever a pair of buds could ever wish into existence. "You could have _warned_ me. One of these days you're going to get your head blown off."

Rhodey finally holsters his gun. Then he walks over and steals Tony's drink off the counter and takes a big gulp. Gives the glass an appreciative look. Of course. Because Tony Stark is an _awesome_ drink mixer. 

"You need a warning system? I keep telling you to let me build you a JARVIS," Tony says and steals his drink back. 

"That's a jump from 'give me a call when you're dropping by'," Rhodey says, unbuttoning his uniform jacket and hanging it over the back of a chair. His little kitchen is cozy, with a drop-leaf breakfast table that converts from tiny to comfortably seating four. Tony's raised one of the leafs to set jars and containers on to better sort through Rhodey's sad bachelor food stuffs.

"Maybe what you need is a Pepper," Tony says, peering into a refrigerator box then tossing the whole thing into the trash. Rhodey looks like he wants to go fish it out, but doesn't. 

"Your collection of nannies is exactly what I need in my life," Rhodey says, as if he isn't a part of that particular unasked-for-services gang, and grabs the next box out of Tony's hands before he can turf that, too. Who knew Rhodes was so attached to his Tupperware. "You may or may not have noticed that some of us manage to live like adults without needing constant supervision."

"Some of you are also boring," Tony points out, fishing a jar of pickles out from the back of the fridge. Rhodey sighs and holds out a hand. Tony hands him the drink back. 

"Anyway," he says, and swings the door of the fridge shut with his foot as he twists the pickle jar open, "Now that you're here; I ran a bug search. The place is clean." The jar opens with a pop and Tony does a little bow with the lid in one hand and the glass jar in the other. 

"Am I supposed to thank you or congratulate you?" Rhodey asks, nodding at the successfully opened jar. There's two whole pickles and some loose chunks in it. Rhodey's life is a disaster. Tony fishes one out and offers the jar, but Rhodey waves him off and takes another slug from the glass instead. 

That drink had been Tony's. Usurping it like that was so rude. 

"I need you to take a vow of secrecy," Tony says, waving the pickle at him, "Loyalty unto death, bros before the US Air Force." 

Rhodey jerks a bit and lowers the glass. Slowly. He looks very serious all of a sudden. "What have you done, Tony?" he says, with breathy almost-terror. Tony gives him his best righteous and offended look. 

"Really?" he asks, "That's what you think? I ask for little _discretion_ and immediately it's that I've _done_ something? Thanks, Rhodes. Really. You're a pal." The pickle isn't great. It's a bit soggy and probably ancient. Tony chews it angrily anyway, for effect. 

"Did you build some kind of weapon?" Rhodey demands, "I thought you were done with that? Or is this some kind of inter-dimensional thing again? If an alien horde is about to storm in through your basement, Tony, I don't think I can keep that to myself."

"What?" Tony asks, and tosses the remainder of the pickle then goes to make a second drink since Rhodey isn't even sharing anymore, "Why would I do that? Why would you _think_ I would do that?" It's possible Rhodey might have reasons for a couple of his suspicions. It's even possible that Tony had _given_ him one or two of those reasons, but inter-dimensional invasion hasn't so far been his fault. Not in any provable way, at least. 

"Okay," Rhodey says, with an exasperated sigh. He sounds like Pepper. Maybe like Steve, a little. "What's this about then?"

"Ah ah ah. Oath of silence first."

"I'm pretty sure putting your new alien tech secrets ahead of national security could get me--oh, I don't know. Charges of treason. Court martialed. Nothing serious, you understand."

Tony's _pfft_ -s and waves his glass, clinking ice cubes as he does. "It's nothing like that. It's about my dog."

"Oh," Rhodey says, and has the decency to look like he feels bad for impugning Tony's character and sense of good judgement, "Oh, in that case. Fine. I think I can safely swear to keep secrets about your dog to myself."

Tony takes a sip. Says, "Do it."

"Tony, I solemnly swear to not repeat secrets about your dog," Rhodey says, but his expression and tone is flat. Like the time when Tony had tried to convince him that the still he was building in his dorm room was for research purposes only. Like when he thinks Tony's being an idiot.

"To _anyone_."

"To anyone," Rhodey dutifully echoes.

"Great," Tony says, and takes a seat, shoving the collection of jars and containers aside to jumble against the wall. Then he reaches into his suit jacket and pulls out a ziploc bag with a piece of thick, creamy paper inside it. "You might need another drink," he says, and hands it over.

"Also, he's not exactly a dog, but I'm still holding you to your promise."

\-----

Tony doesn't get to say _Oh my god, Rhodey, it was so cool, Rhodey_ , the way he'd been rehearsing in his head, because once he starts with the story it's actually kind of a downer and slipping in some gleeful enthusiasm seems heartless somehow. Maybe he shouldn't have started with the request of purchase, because it's set the whole mood and now it's not fun. 

Rhodey's frowning at the paper in his hands, still safely ensconced in it's plastic bag, the neat calligraphy as formal as an upscale wedding invitation. _We courteously inquire_ \--as if there was any way to courteously inquire if someone was willing to betray their friend for a handful of millions. 

Who the fuck did they think Tony was?

"I should have known," Rhodey says, "that nothing with you would be simple. I was hoping you were going to ask me to help you find a vet or something."

Tony gives him a look. "Why would that be a secret?"

"I don't know. Paparazzi? Billionaire dog napping? I was _hoping_. I should have _known_ better. How do you even get tangled up in these things, Tony? I have _actual_ security clearance, and I see more weird shit just hanging around your living room than by any other way."

"Makes you question your life choices, huh?" Tony asks, and leans back with a smug smile. Rhodey gives him a look.

"You have no idea," he says.

\-----

Clint tails him when he gets back to the tower, getting up from the couch casually like he hasn't been lurking there the whole time, probably coming up with doom scenarios. He trails Tony to the kitchen and back to the elevators and then upstairs.

"Thor teach you to heel or something? Brushing up on that dog park etiquette?" Tony asks, stepping off the elevator at his penthouse floor. Clint follows without so much as a _do you mind if I come in_. That's practically implicit permission for Tony to treat _his_ space in the same way. Tony doesn't mention it. Just ditches his suit jacket, draping it over the arm of a chair for a 'bot to pick up and hang and heads into his bedroom to change his shirt for a favored ratty t-shirt.

"Are you going to fill me in or not?" Clint asks, stopping in the doorway and leaning there like he's not impatient as fuck. Tony kicks off his shoes and hunts around for sneakers. His robots are really slacking lately. 

"What's there to tell? Rhodes has no real people food and he thinks you're a cute dog. Fox. Also, he's still impressed with your ping pong ball fetching skills."

Clint snorts and turns so that he's leaning his back against the doorframe instead of his shoulder. Leans his head back until it thumps against the wood. "Tony," he says, with an impatient note of warming in it. He's probably picked that up from Natasha. It's her I-am-about-to-politely-and-pleasantly-twist-your-head-off tone.

"Rhodes can keep a secret," Tony says, "if that's what you're worried about."

Clint glances over out of the corner of his eye. "I know," he says, "But you asked him to do something for you, right?"

"You're good at this spy business. What else do you know?" Tony asks him, with enough dramatic hush-hush in his tone that Clint doesn't read the question as anything but bullshit and just shrugs a shoulder. Nothing, then. Clint's just operating on suspicion and paranoia--maybe a bit on instinct, because he knows Tony is a snoop--and not on actual information. 

"What are you looking for, Tony?" Clint asks, voice low. A hint of something in it that might be wariness. 

"It's nothing bad," Tony lies, and doesn't even really feel guilty since he's mostly doing it to hold at bay the impending spin-out he can see building up. Clint has that tense thing going again that means he's been running through the worst possible outcomes of the situation. He's going to turn himself into a basket case at the rate he's going.

Into more of a basket case. 

And Tony means to help, but it probably does the opposite when he says what he's been thinking, which is, "Stick to the tower for a while, would you, Barton?"

"I thought it wasn't anything bad?" Clint asks, "I thought JARVIS gave the all clear?"

"Yeah. That wasn't a lie." Other things were a lie. Or at least, a giant omission. Tony's not sure how to cover. He sits down on the end of his bed to pull his sneakers on, keeping it casual. 

"What's going on, Tony?" Clint asks, and doesn't even sound angry. Just tired and resigned, and _that_ wasn't what Tony had expected Clint's returning suspicions to look like. He's expected something more like rage and getting his ass kicked. 

"I'm not sure yet," he says, truthfully and Clint makes a soft sound that probably means he thinks his suspicions are being confirmed, but what those suspicions are, exactly, is unclear. 

He wishes Clint would just lay his cards on the table, so he'd know where things stood, but then he'd probably have to do the same, and he hasn't had time yet to catch Cap and plot properly.

"What are you even trying to dig up? Why can't you just leave it alone?"

"You said it was alright to tell Rhodey," Tony points out, and Clint glares. 

"I _said_ , you can fill him in enough so he doesn't--I didn't say _ask him to find stuff_. Do stuff. Whatever it is you're up to."

Damn but Clint has a nose for trouble. Four noses for trouble, if he counts all of them. Four noses and a beak, maybe. Tony leans back on his arms, then changes his mind and gets up. Grabs Clint by the arm on his way out and hustles him back to the elevators. 

"Stick close to the tower. Stay _in_ the tower. You're the one who wants to be paranoid, I'm just encouraging you," he says, when the doors hiss shut. He punches a button for the communal floor and gives Clint a sideways look. Clint's not really looking at him. Clint looks sick. A bit like on that first day, but less intense. 

Like he's been preparing for the rug to be pulled out from under him. 

And maybe it's not entirely undeserved, but it stings anyway. He is, after all, only lying and covering up with the best of intentions. For Clint's own good. 

It's clearly not the best plan anymore. 

It's clearly time for a new plan.

The doors ping and slide open. Tony hits the close button then the hold, freezing the elevator with them both inside it. Clint says, "Well, now I'm convinced you're not up to something." 

"I promise I'll fill you in," Tony says, "Just--"

"Stick close to the tower?"

"Yeah. That. That and don't freak out."

Clint gives him a look, then jabs the open door button. And just great. This isn't how the plan had gone in Tony's head. The original plan. The one where he gathered all the necessary information, then hashed it out with Cap, then something. Fixed things. 

Ideally without dragging Clint back into it. 

Not exactly the most detailed plan, Tony allows, as the closing door warning pings. He doesn't step off, but waits until the doors close again then hits the button for lab level and putters aimlessly, tinkering with bits of machinery and half-finished programs. He half-expects Clint to appear at some point in the late night with an offering of peace coffee, but he doesn't. 

"Circle of Life," he tells JARVIS, even though it's really more like _spiral of life_ , every argument he has with Clint freakishly similar, but not quite repeating. Next time they have this exact same fight, he might even have actual information.

Or really, the next time they have this fight, it'll be _over_ actual information, because Tony can see it looming in the near future. _The reason I didn't tell you anything, Barton, is because I was offered millions for you_. It'll go down great. 

\-----

Rhodey's not the best spy ever. Roping Nat would have worked a whole lot better, if it wasn't for the tell-Clint-everything connection. Hacking into SHIELD tended to work better than Rhodey's careful by-the-books investigations too, but it isn't like SHIELD has a whole lot of data on the human-to-menagerie menagerie, even though it seems like they should.

"You'd be a great Avenger," Tony says, when Rhodey calls, "Already bending rules and distorting the order of your loyalties."

"God forbid," Rhodey says, even though he hasn't even heard Tony's plan to Captain spangle the War Machine suit so he can patriotically match Steve in a sort of soldier boys flag-themed duo.

"You forget how we've seduced top SHIELD agents to our side," Tony says, "with promises of toys and my open bar."

"You already gave me toys," Rhodey says, with that tone that means he's up for a flight and maybe sometime soon. A suit race rematch, maybe, which is pretty naive of him, considering Tony builds the suits and totally rigs the propulsion systems in his favor. 

"Listen. I don't have anything for you," Rhodey says, which makes this a purposeful call if Tony's any judge. 

"Okay," Tony says.

"I mean, nothing definitive. I can't tell if it's shady or illegal, or who it belongs to, or--"

"Why can't you just tell me? This is a secure line. Nobody hacks Tony Stark's telephone. That kind of thing goes the other way around." 

"Let me mail you."

"Yeah, that's way more secure," Tony says, and rolls his eyes, but a second later his computer makes it's _message received_ sound. Tony kicks over in his chair and spins it to face his desk. Hits keys.

"It's an empty file," he says.

"Yep. That's all I got. You do the work. But for the love of god, stay out of trouble."

Tony _hmm_ -s and backs out of it. "Thank you for this electronic blip of nothing," Tony says, even though it's enough, and hangs up before Rhodey can give him a lecture about privacy invasion or being careful or god knew what, then sits and taps his fingers along the edge of the desk and considers the file name. 

The lab doors hiss and--just to be sure--Tony rolls his head to peer over the backrest of his chair.

"Bruce! Just the guy I wanted to see."

Bruce freezes. Looks around suspiciously. Tony's had just about all the suspicion he can take lately, and is about to snap something to that effect when Bruce maybe takes a second look at his face and his expression changes from _don't harass me, Tony_ to _uh-oh what's wrong, Tony_. 

"You've hung around with crazy scientist lab type guys, right?" Tony asks.

"Not willingly," Bruce says slowly, like he thinks he might trip a booby trap, "I tried to uninvite myself, but it didn't take."

"Did you _science_ with crazy science types? Or were you just the science in question at the time?"

"Depends," Bruce says, "Are we counting you?"

Tony nods at his screen, even though Bruce is way too far away to read anything on it. "Does a Project Sphinx mean anything to you?"


	18. Chapter 18

Bruce doesn't know anything about anything, and he's not even really good at hacking into things that might _help them_ to know some things, but at least--unlike Clint--he can make a decent cup of coffee with reliable frequency. 

It's not like Tony needs his help. Tony has a name and most of the time, that's all he needs to start sorting through the digital haystack. 

He's not Tony Stark for nothing.

Bruce, on the other hand, is probably Bruce for the sole purpose of looking disapproving and suspicious and a little scared, but in a way that makes it clear that he thinks whatever might be going on is Tony's doing. Maybe Tony's fault.

Which isn't exactly wrong, but isn't really right, either. 

"Are we doing this now?" Bruce asks, with a furrow in his brow that makes him look almost angry, but in a creepy, smoothed-out, afraid-to-express-emotion way that means Bruce maybe _is_ angry, a little bit. 

"Doing what?" Tony asks, because its always a good idea to have the specifics before answering anything. 

"Skulking," Bruce says, which isn't what Tony's doing, but again, it's not exactly wrong. There's probably a slight element of skulking involved, if looked at from a certain angle. Or at least, there's a certain element of being not-above-board.

"I'm not _skulking_ ," Tony says anyway, "I'm moving forward in a cautious and considered manner."

Bruce looks skeptical and folds his arms over his chest like a disapproving parent. "Tony," he says, and it's in a tone that's just full of _I am disappointed in you, Tony Stark_. It's not very helpful.

"Does Cap know what you're up to?" Bruce goes on, propping his hip against the edge of Tony's desk, "Is it _dangerous_?"

"I don't need a babysitter, _Bruce_ ," Tony snaps, spinning his chair halfway to face him, and tapping his keyboard sharply twice--mostly for effect. He doesn't have much on-screen and therefore nothing to hide. 

Not that he particularly has reasons to hide anything from Bruce. Hiding things from _Clint_ \--and by extension from Natasha--is possibly going to his head a little bit. "I'm just trying to find some information. You know. About the thing. That we've been talking about."

Bruce's expression goes somehow more unamused. "You might need mustache glasses and a newspaper if you're planning to keep going like this," he says. 

"I don't think mustache glasses are useful if you already _have_ a mustache," Tony points out, but Bruce looks unfazed. He, even more than Rhodey, would make a terrible spy. He's not even good at spy disguises.

"Don't hedge," he says, "and don't get into Clint's business anymore. Did you tell him about how you've been digging up his algebra? Because he's been weird all day."

"Home on the range, I take it?" Tony asks, and tries not to let the guilty feeling onto his face. Clint's been hovering near the brink for a while, and it's been obvious that he's sometimes close to slipping over it. He doesn't really need Tony to give him a shove. Even a well-meaning one.

"Working with Cap. I think he might even be wearing Steve out," Bruce says, and finally lets his arms unfold to drop a hand to the table, idly rifling through blueprints and documents Tony's scribbled equations and doodled rough schematics on. "Did you get this Sphinx thing from Rhodes?" he asks quietly, and now his face is unreadable, "Are you getting mixed up in some kind of military thing?" and oh, great. Now he's kicked Bruce in _his_ trauma, too.

"Maybe, and I don't know." he admits, and rolls back a little, gesturing at his screen so Bruce can lean over and peer at what he has so far. Which isn't much. He has leads that lead to nothing, the by-natural-causes death certificate of the old tutor, a medical record from too long before to be useful--treatment of a broken arm from when Clint was five and a half--some shapeshifter crap that sounds like it's half fiction, and, disturbingly, face photos of kids and adults that he can't find names or records of, but none of them are Clint and none of them lead to anything.

It's just scraps.

"I haven't really had a lot of time yet," he points out, "this is just my initial surveying of the landscape."

Bruce gives him a look. Says, "I don't doubt that you _can_ do it--whatever it is you think you're doing. I just doubt that you _should_ ," he says.

He knows he's being left out of a loop, which means that he knows there is a loop. Bruce probably knows--by process of elimination--that Cap is Tony's co-conspirator, too. Which means he knows there's maybe-military involvement, that Tony is may-as-well-be-lying to them, and that his own team captain is a part of the subterfuge. Tony can just about smell the tired suspicion on him. 

"You and Clint should hang out more," he suggests, but Bruce just gives him a troubled little not-following-you frowny look.

\-----

He finds Clint still in the gym, having not actually worked Steve into exhaustion. Steve looks fine. Clint's the one who looks like he's been hit by a freight train, leaning with his arms hooked over the top rope of the boxing ring, but sort of bonelessly, while Steve and Thor go at it like kids on a playground, with no particular style because Thor refuses to acknowledge that fights should have rules, and just the slightest bit too much heat to be considered sportsman-like conduct.

"Ah, friendly competition," Tony says, as Steve hits the mat face-first and Clint winces in sympathy. His short hair is dark and spikey with sweat, his T-shirt sticking to him. Tony climbs up next to him, but keeps some distance. Not only because Clint is sort of gross right now, but also because Tony's somewhat averse to being punched in the face, which might be where things are going with Clint.

"Hey, Barton," he says, folding his arms over the top rope and resting his weight on them, "You set up a blondie versus blondie pit fight and didn't invite me?" Clint glances over. Tony looks him up and down. "Well. Blondie versus blondie versus runt," he says. 

"Runt?" Clint asks, "Does that mean you want a turn?" It's flatter than Clint's usual snippy-pissy tone, which could be a sign that Clint's had it with him and can't be bothered or that he's worn out his smarts trying to out-fight Steve. Or maybe both. Furious tired Clint was starting to be a tower fixture. 

It was preferable to freaking out, suspicious Clint, but only by a hair. 

The recent Clint options kind of sucked.

Steve manages to pull Thor's feet out from under him, and they end up in a tangle, fighting for the upper hand, Thor swearing unintelligibly as they go. Clint looks kind of bored. He could probably tiger-grapple the both of them in no time flat. 

"Come with word on my house arrest?" Clint asks, in a tired monotone. The sideways look he gives Tony is expressionless, but not really guarded. Like he's resigned to the thought of Tony being up to something. 

And that's odd, because Tony doesn't really think of himself as a schemer, and doesn't even hold schemers in any kind of esteem, Natasha excepted. It's not like he has aspirations of being a younger, better looking, smarter Fury. Or any kind of Fury.

"You're not _under_ house arrest," he tells Clint, and can't quite make it sarcastic because the look Clint shoots him is a Natasha-ish seeing-right-through-you look and he's not sure if Clint's perfected the actual skill or just the facial expression that goes with it.

Or maybe he has, because the next thing he says is, "What did you ask Rhodes to do? What did he _tell_ you?"

Their conversation stops as Steve and Thor's grappling gets a bit too close for them to be definitely out of range of any missed attacks. Tony leans away, but Clint doesn't move, just looks over at him with an amused smile.

Not pissed, then, but it isn't the relief Tony had thought it would be. Clint's resignation is, actually, worse than having stupid repetitive fights.

"Don't murder me," Tony says, watching Thor try to do just that to Steve. Clint snorts.

"I already considered it, but I need you to unfreeze my computer."

"Jesus, Barton. Just stop downloading things."

"You should set up parental controls. They can go with my house arrest. And with my new tower security clearance."

Steve hits the mat hard, but manages to turn it into a roll, and Thor yells something angry sounding in Asgardian that makes Clint grin. If Clint's placing bets in his head, he's probably backing Thor, even if only out of carried-me-in-his-jacket loyalty. 

"What security clearance?" Tony says, thinking it's a comment about Pepper and Rhodey's coming and going. 

"The security clearance where I don't get to know any of the grown up information. I hear Nat's been demoted to it, too. I tried to interrogate Bruce to see where he stood, but I didn't get very far before it got dicey."

That last bit is probably bullshit. Or at least gross mischaracterization, because Bruce didn't seem put out about Clint when Tony had seen him and anything that pushed Bruce close to hulking tended to leave him at least a little bit cranky afterwards.

Tony lets his breath out in a long puff, then says, "Someone might be looking for you," like a confession. Like it's somehow his fault that he's rich as fuck and people thinks he owns _stuff_.

"I figured that out when you said stick close to the tower, Tony," Clint says with exasperation. Tony blinks. Not because he's surprised that Clint had come to that pretty much self-explanatory conclusion, but because Clint isn't trying to instigate violence against him for trying to keep it to himself. 

Himself and Cap. He could maybe blame the secrecy on Cap.

"I had Rhodey do a bit of snooping," he says instead.

"I know."

"We're not going to let anyone have you," Tony says, in case Clint's getting ready to be an idiot about that all over again. Instead, Clint looks strangely deflated. Like he'd also expected himself to be furious at Tony and is surprised that he isn't.

"I know," he says, "Because Thor would kill you."

"Thor and Nat," Tony corrects, even though he knows it's a joke about the way Thor seems to be trying to twist Steve's head off, "And anyway, who else would bring me poison coffee?"

"Fuck you. I bring you _great_ coffee," Clint says. It's passable coffee. maybe decent coffee. Tony doesn't mention it. Reminds himself that he's relieved that Clint isn't pissed as hell at him and that it's probably not in his best interest to undo that stroke of luck.

"Bring me more coffee," Tony offers, "I'll tell you all about why you're under house arrest."

"I said that was a making up thing," Clint says, as Tony hops down from the edge of the ring, "You should bring _me_ coffee."

Usually, apologies are a one way street. Tony isn't that big on remorse, or at least expressions of it, but he says, "Yeah, alright. Or tea, maybe?"

"You can't water down your apology to tea, Tony," Clint says, because apparently _sorry_ is defined by caffeine content. Which probably means that nothing that makes sense to bring to the range counts. 

It's pretty wily.

Clint gives him a funny look when he says so and calls after him, "Get some damn sleep, Tony. You're getting weird."


	19. Chapter 19

Tony never gets the chance to talk to Clint about his secrets that are maybe more Clint's secrets that he's usurped, because Clint doesn't bother to come find him for two days, and by the third day everything's gone even further to shit. 

"What do you mean you _don't know what happened_?" Clint demands, shouting it across the open floor plan of the penthouse floor. JARVIS has divested Tony of the suit, so he's not sure how he'd fare if Clint _really_ lost his temper, but also this used to be a private floor.

"How did you get up here?" he asks, not because that's more important, but because keeping Clint talking is more likely to cool him down, or keep him from panicking. Or whatever it is that he's doing, his face somewhere between furious, terrified, and some unnameable expression that's more blank than anything. Like he can't quite figure out how to arrange his face to communicate the emotion behind it.

Tony sort of knows the feeling though, so he doesn't comment on it. 

"Why didn't you--" Clint starts, and without really stopping goes straight into, "If you had let me go--" and then into, "You _lost_ Steve?"

"Not like _that_ ," Tony says, and really this sort of miscommunication was getting to be a problem with their team, "Yeah okay, maybe a bit like that."

"Don't explain. Nat already explained," Clint says, sounding pissed at them all. Like he's a baby Steve, stepping up into big brother's shoes, if only to dress them down. 

"You going to give me a Cap lecture?" Tony asks, voice rising, "Because I don't think that you can pull it off."

Clint's jaw tenses. "No," he says, but then says, "Goddammit, Tony. I wasn't there. If I'm not there, _you're_ supposed to be the eyes above," and it sounds kind of like a Cap lecture, "How can you--"

"Not know what happened?" Tony yells back, "I'm sorry, Barton, but I don't know what happened. What do you want me to say? Do you think this is helping us find Cap? Do you think this is effective fucking time management?"

"You should have let me--"

" _I_ should have? _Cap_ didn't want you out there either, doing your up high and out of our sight thing. It's practically setting you up for a hawk napping."

"Well, now we've lost _Steve_ , so I hope you think that was a fair trade," Clint snaps back, and somewhere along the way, they've ended up toe-to-toe, shouting in each other's faces, Clint not-quite jabbing his finger into Tony's chest, clenching and unclenching one half-raised fist. Maybe aware of the arc-reactor, or maybe not wanting to risk turning it into a real fight. 

With thrown punches and everything. 

Tony would almost like that. He's in a mood to let off some steam, get some _pissed off as fuck_ out of his system, but in the next second Clint's stepping back and not-quite deflating, but at least ratcheting down the animosity enough that it's not pinging crazily all over Tony's post-mission adrenaline.

Or mission adrenaline, really. It's not like it's over. 

"He's not answering his comm?" Clint asks after awhile, stupidly, and Tony gives him a look, because _really_ , but Clint goes on, following it up with the equally pointless, "You can't get a trace on him? His shield? Something?"

"No," Tony says, "But I might be implanting the rest of you with GPS devices before I let you go out again."

The corner of Clint's mouth twitches, but it's not a smile so much as an acknowledgement of the attempt at humor. "But not you?" he asks, taking another step back to let Tony pass, then trailing him to the elevators.

"I'm the one with the tracking system. It doesn't make any sense to chip _me_ ," Tony says, punching in the floor number to head down to the lab where the others are probably already waiting. "You and Steve can barely work out the TV remotes."

\-----

The lab is a war room now, all the camera feeds surrounding the site of the losing Cap _incident_ that Tony can hack into and then some playing in windows cluttering his screen, with JARVIS scanning everything from traffic cams to security feeds to their own comm chatter, filtering for anything useful. 

The others are already there--Thor and a de-Hulked Banner and Natasha, still wearing her calm mission-face even though her hair is all over the place and her face streaked with what might be dust and might be ash. Clint had abandoned Tony in the elevator as they passed the residential floors, but he joins them minutes later, half in his mission gear and dumping the rest of it on a table.

"Well," Tony says, as he comes over, "Since we're all here, I guess we should--"

"Fill me in?" Clint suggests, hauling himself up to sit on the end of one of the work tables and eyeing the multiple feeds playing on the monitors, watching them skip and close to be replaced by others as JARVIS sorts through them.

"I was about to say the same thing," Bruce says, and there's really no point in looking to Natasha for support, because she's nodding along, mouth a flat, pressed together line.

"You and Cap--" she starts.

"It has nothing to do with this." Tony says, because that's probably true.

Or not. The timing is too suspicious. So is the coincidental kidnapping right on the tails of their concerns of possible kidnapping. 

On the other hand, it's not like Cap isn't instantly recognizable in his red white and cobalt Captain suit. Anyone interested in finding Clint didn't have a reason to pick up _Steve_.

"Oh god, I have so many bad feelings about this," Tony says, flopping backwards into a chair. It rolls back from the force, until the drag of his heels on the floor brings it to a stop. 

"About _what_?" Natasha asks, then says something rude when Tony spins the chair to face away from her and wheels away, following the edge of the desk until he can yank open a drawer and pull a ziploc bag out from under a pile of unsorted parts--reclaimed bits of scrapped experiments--and then turns slowly to face the others.

Facing the music, and without Steve for backup or blame misdirection. Or at least to take some of the heat.

"This is what I asked Rhodes to look into," he says, and the heavy paper buckles a little under the fingers of both his hands, "Clint."

Clint looks at Natasha and they do a silent exchange thing for a few seconds. Tony can't join the telepathy, but he can read it some of the time. Identifies the mutual questioning looks-- _Are you in on this?_ \--the verification that neither is, a suspicious back and forth that Tony mentally subtitles, _I have no guesses, do you have guesses? No, I don't have any guesses_ , and the sorting out who should go investigate.

It's like they think he's think holding a bomb. And maybe that's not so wrong. _He's_ felt like he's been holding a bomb, ever since the damn thing had appeared in his mailbox and maybe it's _his_ tension that's filled the lab, the team gone so quiet that the rustle of plastic and paper seems loud. Even Thor is quiet and watchful.

"Red," Tony prompts, holding it out to Natasha, but she and Clint exchange a look he can't interpret--flat and as far as he can tell, expressionless--and it's Clint who slides off his perch, taking a few sheets of papers with him. He lets them drift to the floor and pads over, even his thick-soled mission boots silent. Tony doesn't know whether to credit SHIELD R-and-D for that, or if it's just Clint. 

"It seemed like the best way to deal with it at the time--" he starts, and Clint finally looks at him. Tony had been under the impression that Clint was either on to him, or somehow reading him, but Clint's face is mostly confused dread. Tony can tell he's still thinking _these assholes lost Steve_ , and that the paper Tony's holding has something to do with that. 

He hasn't jumped back to the lying hiding scheming suspicions of the more recent past.

Tony's about to draw the paper back, and maybe give Clint a quick run down so he won't be taken by surprise, when Bruce just strides over and plucks it from his fingers, using Clint's hesitation to swoop in. He's got the bag open and discarded and the paper unfolded before Tony can catch up.

Before Clint can catch up too, it looks like, because he doesn't make any move to snatch it back. He just stands there and watches Bruce read.

"We courteously inquire," Bruce reads, with newscaster precision, then looks up. "Courteously?"

Tony had stuck on the wording himself, but with Steve missing, there isn't really time to have for a proper freak-Bruce-out tantrum about it, so he keeps it contained. There's still another shoe to drop, anyway. If they need dramatics, he can bring some out then.

"Inquire _what_?" Clint demands, with a rising note in his voice that sounds a lot like suppressed panic.

Bruce lowers the paper to look at him, then hands it off to Natasha, Clint's gaze following it suspiciously. Tony's glad he's left his weapons out of quick reach. 

"Inquire," Bruce says, drawing Clint's attention back, "how much Tony wants for you."

Tony had been expecting a blow-up of some kind, rage or panic or even Clint quietly disappearing. Instead he just freezes, looking between Bruce and the paper in Natasha's hand and Tony. Tony's not sure what expression to put on his face to look convincingly trustworthy. He starts to smile, and it seems wrong. Trying to look serious just makes him look guilty, probably.

Clint opens his mouth to talk, makes a strangled noise, and closes it again. Then goes through the whole cycle again, until Thor steps up and gives him a little shake but then doesn't let him go. Just lets his hands stay resting on Clint's shoulders like he also thinks Clint might bolt, given half a chance.

"Oh," Clint manages, finally, "oh, _god_."

"I asked Rhodes to take a little look-see," Tony says, and holds out his hand for the paper, and Natasha hands it back, but her face is a mask of suspicion fit to match Clint's.

Bruce says, "You _and_ Steve knew about this?"

"Steve knew some of it. I didn't get the chance to show him--" He lets it trail and wheels back to the computer to bring up the file from Rhodey and the bits and scraps he's collected. It includes a logo now, and a few briefs, the project name clearly readable in the letterhead, but most of the contents blacked out or pixelated beyond recovery.

"Oh god," Clint says again, "oh god," then, "And you let them have _Cap_? You _sidelined_ me and you let them have Cap?"

"Nobody's letting anyone have anyone, Barton," Tony says, "We don't even know if--"

"No. They--" There's a brief scuffling sound as Clint tries to shrug Thor off and Thor refuses to be removed, "You don't _understand_. Steve's got a--a fucking _healing factor_."

He sounds horrified enough that Tony turns again, and Clint also _looks_ horrified, leaning towards him and against Thor's restraining hands, like Thor can barely hold him back,"You don't understand what they could do to him and not have to--What they could do to him _forever_ , Tony."

"I think we have an idea, Clint," Bruce says quietly.

Tony turns back to glare at his screen. "No one's letting anyone have anyone," he says.

\----- 

Travel by boxcar is uncomfortable and dark and somewhat subject to outside temperature if not actually to weather. It's hot and in the dark feels more suffocating than it probably is, but at least it isn't winter and he's not freezing.

Clint thinks, with childish regret, of plans he'd had to take off that evening to the pond, where thickets of bushes were left to grow as cover for birds but that also provided cover for truancy and swimming. 

He's not really scared of the boxcar or where they're taking him, the way he'd been the first time. He knows he's an expensive shift now, with his multiple exotics. He's not great at all of them, but he can shift them, and hold them, and move around in them with some amount of coordination.

He doesn't trip over too-big tiger feet any more. He's been long limbed and scrappy for awhile, and if he's not large pawed and cute anymore, he's at least on his way to heavyweight hunter.

If he's not worth as much right now, at this lanky cat stage, he will be again later. The boxcar doesn't worry him.

The desolation of the building they bring him to, so unlike the grounds around the house he'd been living in and out in what appears to be the middle of nowhere--that worries him. 

The place has sterile white halls and smells like a hospital, but there's no waiting area--no plastic seats and impatient nurses. No screaming kids, and the room they bring him to is more like a cell. Small, and with a small high window and a simple cot with a blanket folded on the end of it. They give him loose, light clothes to wear. They're not quite like pajamas, and for the first four days, until the first time the doctors--the _scientists_ \--come for him, Clint is stupidly, illogically convinced that he's been sent to juvie for popping that guy's knee.

Then he's reminded that he's an expensive shift, and they don't let those go to waste.

\-----

"Don't have a panic attack, Barton," Tony says, and it pretty much sucks of him that there's a small part of his brain that is noting the way that Steve being in what might be mortal peril has taken the heat off him a little for this request of purchase secrecy thing.

At least, it's distracted Clint from all the things that had _been_ distracting Clint, and if they can just shove and bully him into mission mode, he'd probably even hold it together enough to be useful. 

The part of his brain that is scheming that is also, probably, a part of his brain that might be less than noble. Or possibly just good at triage. 

"I'm not _having_ a panic attack," Clint snaps, looking like that might be a lie. Breathing, a little bit, like that might be a lie. 

"We're all worried about Steve," Bruce says in a smooth calming tone that Clint ignores in favor of taking the paper from where Tony's put it down on his desk, turning it over in his hands to examine both sides as if there might be a clue that Tony had missed or failed to look into. 

"There's a number," he says.

"Burner phone," Tony says, "Can't trace it except to tell you it was bought with cash in a department store in Pennsylvania. And that's probably a red herring."

"You should call it," Clint says, sounding casual and shrugging a bit as he does. Holding the paper out like it's no big deal. Tony can't tell if his calm is real or if he's faking it. It's possible fear for Steve has knocked his own paranoia right out of him. 

"I had JARVIS do it, and tried to triangulate the--" he waves his hand, "you know. Cell towers and stuff. Got a different location every time." 

Clint smiles, crooked and with genuine amusement even if it's dark and brittle around the edges, too. "Someone with a throw-away cell is out smarting Tony Stark?" he says, still trying to hand the _inquiry_ back, " _Call_ it."

"I said, I already had JARVIS--"

"No. I mean, _call_ it, Tony."

"Clint--"

 _That_ pushes Clint over the edge. "They have _Steve_ ," he returns at a shout, leaning over Tony, slamming the paper down. Bruce jumps. Natasha and Thor don't.

" _Might_ have Steve, Clint. For all we know, this is a--"

"Coincidence?" Clint asks, wry and angry at the same time. Sounding like he thinks that's about as likely as Tony had. "You really want to gamble on that?"

"Goddammit," Tony spits, and pulls the paper out from under Clint's hand. Clint picks his hand up a bit to let him, and realizes how he's been leaning forward and into Tony's space and straightens. Retreats a few steps to lean against a table next to Natasha. 

"It's not like we have a lot of leads right now," Natasha says, "Unless the captain breaks out and rescues himself."

"That could happen," Tony points out, hopefully, but not with a whole ton of optimism, "We _are_ talking about _Steve_."

"Time is passing," Thor says in a grumble, impatient at the lack of action, but Clint nods at the clutter on Tony's screen--the logo and letterhead and redacted-to-hell documents.

"They won't kill him," he says, "If it's Sphinx, their aim's going to be to keep him." 

"Oh, I feel so much better now, Barton, thanks," Tony snaps, "I don't know why we were worried at all."

Clint shrugs again, like he's not bothered and on the surface at least he looks like he's the most collected of all of them. He's beating Bruce by a long shot, anyway, because Bruce had gone pale at the _aim to keep him_ comment.

"What is this Sphinx business?" Natasha demands, and Clint glances at her but doesn't answer other than to lean sideways for a second, bumping her in friendly reassurance. Judging by Natasha's solemn frown, it doesn't look like it's taking.

"Call, Tony," Clint says, again. His plan sucks worse than usual. 

"I told you--"

"You think a guy who's outsmarting you with a twenty dollar phone doesn't know when he's talking to your computer?" Clint asks.

"I told you I'm pretty sure that phone thing is a ruse," Tony says, but types the number into the computer and says, "Ring the gentleman, please, JARVIS." It rings and keeps ringing, then goes to static. Tony makes a _see?_ gesture at the screen, even though there's nothing call-related displayed on it.

Clint isn't deterred. "Maybe you have to say something," he suggests, low voiced.

"Yeah? Like _what_? 'Give back our Captain America'? "

"Like that you're prepared to cut a deal," Clint says.

Tony twitches, but Clint doesn't look like he's willing to back down, and it's his call. It's only fair to let it be his call. "We know you have the captain," Tony says, leaning a little towards his computer, to where the mic is hidden, holding Clint's gaze as he follows his stupid as shit game plan and says, "Let's deal."


	20. Chapter 20

They wait for the static to turn into something coherent, but like a lot of Clint's plans, it turns out to be pretty anticlimactic. They just sit in silence for a while with Clint trying to stare down the speaker and Thor and Natasha watching him with about the same level of intensity while Tony and Bruce glance from each other to the computer screen and watch the trace Tony had--uselessly--put on the call. It's pinging somewhere in Missouri, which is probably bullshit, just like the times it had pinged Alaska or Nevada. 

"Well," Tony says, "Next inane desperation play? Anyone?" But before anyone can take him up on it, the call cuts out and a dial tone fills the room. And then the electronic _beep beep bop_ of a touchtone phone. It's pretty dramatic. Tony would be impressed if it wasn't also a ridiculous level of theatrics. 

If he wasn't Tony Stark, it might even actually work. He's not about to be impressed by someone _else's_ glorified reverse call, but Clint and Bruce look a little freaked out. Thor probably doesn't get the significance of the sound since phone usage isn't ingrained into him in the same way. He just looks thoughtful and patient, waiting for what comes next and it's a bit strange to wish that the rest of the team would act more like Thor. 

"So I guess this is a thing your people do?" Natasha asks, with smooth nastiness, probably referring to the phone-tag. Tony's not exactly sure, but he's still more impressed by the silken threat of her tone than the attempt at intimidation-by-touchtone. 

"Peh. _My_ people," he sniffs back. He'd make a joke about _them_ being his people, but any way he tries it in his head either sounds too sappy or too sarcastic and while Cap is missing isn't the time for either of those things. 

And besides, the heartfelt comrade speech is really more Thor's niche. Usurping it would be unfair. 

"Mr. Stark," a voice that isn't JARVIS says, with cool enunciation, precise and educated and with all the awareness of a pre-recorded message. 

"He won't talk to my computer, but I have to talk to his answering machine?" Tony complains, as the voice starts to politely invite him to meet at his convenience. They haven't verified whether they have Steve, but Tony's guessing yes and in that case _at your convenience_ is way more asshole than courteous consideration.

"Maybe he's richer than you," Natasha suggests, "Is there some kind of pecking order?"

Tony gives her a peeved look over his shoulder. This lumping him in with all the wealthy thing is a bit rude, but Natasha meets his irritation with a smile, leaning against a table again, this time next to Thor since Clint is back to hovering by Tony's shoulder, watching the computer screen scroll useless information. The trace is bouncing around now, not even pretending to not be fake. It's seriously irritating. 

And then the location indicator jumps from Canada to Mexico and back to the 'States to settle in Virginia, where it blinks calmly for a few seconds before the classy robot voice gives him an address. He almost expects it to ask him to come alone, but then, considering they're forcing his participation in their little economic exchange--or maybe hostage exchange, now--it would be pretty ludicrous to expect him to. Especially since it's not him that they want. Considering the circumstances, Tony's perfectly capable of turning up alone. Maybe with Thor.

Or the Hulk.

On the bright side, it's at least a bit refreshing to not be the target of kidnapping and hostage taking, but Tony keeps that to himself because Clint probably thinks it's old as fuck to be the target of imprisonment and human trafficking and Bruce and Natasha probably share a lot of his opinions.

"Sir," JARVIS pipes up, redundantly since the voice message has already given them the address and Tony's already scribbled it out with a pencil and on papers that maybe Pepper had left on his desk for him to sign, "I have a lock on the call location."

"Yes, JARVIS. Thank you," Tony says, glaring at the little blinking pointer on his map, a non-threatening orange dot with a foot, like an upside-down tear drop, "Print up a post-it. And get the jet ready." 

There's no suggestion or comment about who should pilot. Clint's busy fussing with his quiver, adjusting the thing like he can't get it to sit right, but that's about as good as him putting up his hand and insisting. Clint's not going to be willing to take a backseat--literally or otherwise--when the last time Tony had decided that that was a good idea hadn't worked out particularly great.

"Keeping your people paws, Barton?" Tony asks, nodding at the gear Clint's just about finished throwing on. He really needs some kind of stretchy tac vest. A K-9 cop type of deal but one that was self adjusting so he wouldn't risk strangulation and maybe amputation every time he wanted to shift. Maybe so he wouldn't risk getting picked up for public indecency if he had to shift back to human while at a distance from his gear. Again.

The mutant shark fighting nudity incident isn't the immediate past anymore, but it's not gone from Tony's memory, either. Clint's inner bestiary would be a lot more useful if using it didn't also put him at risk of being soft, pink and defenseless--relatively speaking--while in the middle of a fight and-or public space.

Tony lets the gears spin a bit, but there's nothing he can do about it now. They haven't even figured how to consistently keep pants on _Bruce_ , and the man-to-Hulk change is mostly a straight size issue without having to allow for the drastic shift in structure and body mechanics involved in accommodating a human, a felid and a canine. 

And maybe even a bird.

Clint shrugs. He's serious and quiet, and even when he'd been half convinced that they were going to be the death of him, he'd managed to be close to his snippy self. Managed to be even snippier than his self. Tony's not sure if he's worried, worried about Cap or trying to fill Cap's shoes.

If it's that last, he's going to have to work on it some. Steve's fearless leader bit doesn't have that undertone of _fuck all of you_.

"We're getting him back," Tony says, turning in his chair a little, "He'll be fine."

"He'd better be fine," Clint says, and Tony's not entirely sure who his threatening tone is aimed at.

\-----

The coordinates lead them to a thickly wooded, sparsely populated area. By the time they're doing a recon pass, there's nothing under them but trees. There's probably someone living down there, somewhere, but it's the also the sort of backwater that government agencies not fond of ostentatious flying fortresses are fond of. 

"Take a look, Tony," Clint says, as he brings the quinjet down in a clearing some safe distance away from their meet-and-greet-and-rescue-Cap coordinate points, " _This_ could be forest."

Clint's awfully picky about his biomes for a guy who doesn't even know what kind of a bird he is, but Tony doesn't point it out. Instead he says, "I'd suggest you and Natasha do your sneak-a-peek thing while us more physical types ring the door bell, but I think we're going to need your presence at the front door, Barton."

"You're a more physical type?" Clint asks, but he's doing some kind of communication exchange with Nat, pulling his quiver off at the same time and hanging it over the back of the pilot's seat.

"I meant brute force types," Tony says, grabbing the quiver and then the bow when Clint dumps that too and giving both to Thor, telling him, "We need Clint, so you're with Nat. Try not to knock down any trees or anything."

"And stay on comms," Clint says, double checking himself for any obvious weapons or equipment that might make the insincerity of their trade-in immediately obvious. Or more immediately obvious, anyway. Tony doesn't exactly expect them to not be expecting resistance. It's not like they're trading Clint in coercion-free, after all.

\-----

Tony chooses Bruce to go with them, because Bruce is relatively puny and non-threatening looking and he's inexplicably wearing a tie which makes Tony wonder how he manages not to have Clint's strangled-by-my-tshirt problem, but also makes him look like he might be some kind of frumpy lawyer. 

And there's the bonus that he doesn't need to come armed to a hostage trade slash team mate sell off, because Bruce is as good as walking arms--which is probably a sentiment Bruce wouldn't appreciate but Tony sort of envies because he has _his_ armament in a briefcase and Clint's is traipsing through the trees with Thor somewhere.

"This is a good idea, going in just all regular people," Clint comments, even though Bruce really isn't. Even though Clint never had been, this whole time that he's been whining his _just human you guys_ whine. Tony's really the delicate one here, even if Clint has good reason to be feeling the lack of his weaponry. Or maybe not, because Clint will need to get out of his things before he's any use and in the mean time fluffy and foxy isn't exactly the most battle-ready of his options. 

"Tell me if anything starts to look familiar," Tony says, checking his watch--or rather, wrist mounted computer, JARVIS link-up and suit remote--to make sure they're still on track.

"These trees," Clint offers, "look like other trees I've seen," but keeps walking. Leaves crunch under his boots as he does, and pretty soon Tony realizes that they're on some kind of path, covered by at least several years of foliage and growth. There's still a gap in the trees above them, which suggests that the path was quiet a bit wider once. It leads directly away from where they'd landed.

"Did you put us down in a helipad? Did you _know_ there was a helipad?"

"I put us down in an empty spot," Clint says, with a shrug like he's adjusting his quiver, then stills when he remembers it's not there."I didn't get outside much, Tony."

Bruce says, "God," low and to himself, and tugs at his tie. He actually looks a lot more disheveled, harried professor than frumpy lawyer and it's not like anyone would really believe that any lawyer of Tony Stark's would dress like Bruce. Probably. He should have brought Nat. Nat dressed sharp.

"I'm just saying," Tony says, "This isn't an obvious approach route at all."

Clint stops long enough to give him a cool look and he's not so great at being a fake prisoner. Or fake property. Or whatever it is these lunatics are expecting. If this was any other fake being-my-for-sale-item situation Tony could come up with a way to tell him to curb the attitude, but Clint's sudden air of calm and control is actually kind of unnerving when this actuality is probably horrifically close to what he'd been imagining the first time they were in a forest discussing--or Tony was discussing, anyway--his shapeshifting thing.

He should have found a way to get a tracker on Clint, like he'd threatened. He's brilliant. He could figure it out, if Clint wasn't so nervy about being experimented on. Some kind of tracking-in-the-wild radar tag, maybe. Like they used on whales or fish or something. Something implanted and tiny enough not to cause damage through the shifts. 

If they lose Clint getting Cap back, it won't exactly be an improvement on the situation. There'll probably even be the same reproachful silence, but from Steve instead of from Clint. The self-sacrificing assholes.

"Circling," Natasha reports over the comm, and it's pretty impressive that he hasn't heard or seen any sign of them. Not even of Thor. The man is pretty unexpectedly quiet when he needs to be. 

"Circling what?" Bruce asks, but then they get to a roll in the land and a low building comes into view, surrounded by the wire fencing and _no trespassing_ signs that, in such a secluded location, just scream shady dealings. Bruce comes to a stop and says, "Oh," and a second later Clint also stops walking, going still just behind Bruce, close enough that they're almost touching. 

"No one's letting anyone have anyone," Tony reminds Clint, catching his arm and pulling him back a few steps. They're not quite hidden behind the rise, but it's not like they're unexpected company. "If we have to make the trade, we'll get you back."

Clint gives him a look out of the corner of his eye. A quick glance over and then back at the building, just visible beyond Bruce and his used car salesman get-up. No matter how calm he looks on the surface, he's also practically vibrating under Tony's hand. "Yeah," he says, "I know."

"As soon as humanly possible," Tony promises, moving his hand to Clint's back in what could pass as a restraining gesture. 

"In less than a year, even," Clint jokes, not looking at him but letting Tony nudge him back towards Bruce, who steps in close on his other side. 

The fence, when they get to it, is torn. The gate hanging off it's hinges and a guard station inundated by leaves and abandoned. Stained by weather and mold. The walls of the building itself aren't in much better shape. Are in worse shape, dark stains creeping up from it's broken windows and gathering under it's overhangs. Rusted gutters are hanging loose along the edge of it's roof or trailing broken towards the ground and the rails on either side of the steps leading into the dark mouth of the building are cracked and down to bare, grayed wood, only patches of flaking paint still clinging to them. There's some kind of small tree growing between the bricks of the walk, buckling the path around it. Under the decay, the place has the air of a combination of post office and school house. It looks boring and institutional and not at all like Tony had imagined a house of brutal horrors to look.

Clint stops as they step off the path from the woods onto a hard surface that, when Tony kicks the leaves away, turns out to be cracked asphalt. The road leads away to another gap in the fence, guarded by another rotting watch post. "This," Clint says, and stops, with what could be a half-wince, one eye a little narrowed, mouth looking like it wants to pull into a grimace. Tony tightens his grip a moment, then loosens it, but keeps his hand on Clint. "There was a fire," Clint says, needlessly considering the obvious smoke damage, eyes fixed on that front entrance. "Look how shallow those steps are." He laughs a little, in the same quietly amused way that he does when his weird goofing with Thor and Natasha get on Tony's nerves. Like someone's pulled a joke on someone and he's enjoying it.

"Keep it together," Tony tells him, and gives his back a pat. Clint takes a little step back into it.

"They looked so big the first time around," Clint snorts, "on my way in." 

Bruce says, "We're getting Cap and getting out," and puts his hand on the back of Clint's shoulder, nudging him a little bit away from Tony and nodding at the briefcase. Freeing Tony's hands so he can get to the Iron suit. 

"How are we doing, team sneaky?" Tony asks the comms, "Because we're at the front door and I think we're going have to go in before Hawkeye loses his mind."

"Go," Natasha says, "I have eyes on you. We'll follow you in."

So now they're recon _for_ their recon. Cap would be so proud of their tactical planning. Tony can't wait to tell him it's mostly Clint's scheme, even though that doesn't absolve the rest of them since they know that Clint's plans, as a rule, are terrible and they've followed it anyway.

"Come on Cap two point oh," Tony says, "let's get your party going," and Bruce pats Clint's back twice, nudging him a step or two before Clint stops again.

Tony takes a breath and says, " _Move_ , Clint," in his _this is my boardroom and you'll do what I want_ voice. Or really, Pep's, _go into your boardroom and do your damn job_ voice. Just in case anyone's listening in. Clint gives him a look for his trouble, but then he takes a breath and lets it out and lets Bruce perp-walk him up the steps.

"Easy," Bruce murmurs when Clint stumbles a little at the top and it's low enough that Tony mostly hears it through the comm, "Focus on getting Steve."

"I'm _focusing_ on Steve," Clint hisses, and fair point. If Clint _wasn't_ thinking about Steve, he probably wouldn't be taking the next step and the one after that, even though he looks like he's watching his own feet, like they're moving without him and he can't figure out why. 

The doors to the building are glass. Dark and intact and flanked by large floor-to-ceiling windows. There's birds' nests nestled along the beams supporting them, years of dropping streaking down the glass. It's not enough to obscure the logo displayed there, white against the tinted glass of the window, a partial circle setting behind the iconic form of a Sphinx, still sharp and clear even though everything around it is rotting to pieces. 

"If I ever make a secret underground organization," Tony tells Bruce, "remind me to _not_ create fancy brand identity. Who do they hire to design these things anyway?"

Bruce ignores him other than to say, "Focus, Tony," in a low, even voice and he probably has his hands full with _Clint_ not focusing. 

There no leaves blown into the reception area, which means the doors were closed until relatively recently, but the linoleum floor is uneven and peeling up in places. There's a long desk, like a hotel check-in, but no more Sphinx logo anywhere. The ceiling is dark with smoke damage and water staining and mold.

"Inside," Clint says, and Tony gives him a questioning look and then realizes Clint's talking to Nat and Thor. 

"Right behind you," Natasha's voice comes back, oddly gentle, "Any sign of anyone yet?"

"No," Tony says, "You?"

"Signs of disturbance," Natasha says, "Leaves moved, vegetation crushed, things like that. Someone was around. No idea where they are now or how many of them there were."

"At least someone's here," Clint says, and clears his throat. "Take my comm, Tony. Going silent, Widow."

"That's not silent. That's off-grid," Natasha says, but she doesn't sound like she has a problem with Clint's stupid as fuck ideas, "Be careful."

"It's okay," Clint says, "I've got a Hulk," and then he takes out his earpiece and slips it into Tony's pocket, clarifying, "In case they search me."

"Jesus. Jesus, we aren't doing this," Bruce says, but not as a signal to eject. More as a disbelieving murmur. He sounds about as bad as Clint and maybe Tony _should_ have brought Nat, who might not be indestructible, but at least doesn't have deep-seated lab rat related trauma. As far as Tony's aware, anyway.

"This place looks like a dental office," Tony says, peering around, leaning over the reception desk to get a look-see. There's still stacks of mouldering paper. Yellowed stationary scattered on the floor and tucked into cubbies. It looks like a place abandoned suddenly. There's pens and personal items in with the papers.

"Because everyone loves dental offices," Clint is saying, looking around but not moving from where Tony'd left him, stuck close to Bruce. Then he says, "I didn't come out this way. I--" and stops to look back at the doors they'd come through. Tony's not sure if he's looking for Natasha or remembering until he says, "I thought it looked like some kind of home. For bad kids," and laughs shakily. He nods down a corridor. "They took me that way."

It feels like he or Bruce should say something. Something like _it's okay, Barton_ , or _try not to think about it_ or maybe even _get a damn grip, Hawkeye_ but they all seem inadequate somehow. Tony doesn't really want to think about the years Clint had spent in this place or what this place was used for. Or what _Clint_ was used for.

Fuck Bruce. Fuck Bruce and his _they'd have put him down_. Tony thought he'd banished that from his head, but it's back now along with Clint's idiotic, _don't worry, I was all grown-up by the time they started vivisection_. 

"How many--" Tony starts, thinking that it's not that big a facility. That if Steve's there Hulk and Thor could tear through any walls that might stand between them and Cap in a matter of maybe twenty minutes tops, if Hulk gets distracted, but Clint seems to read his mind because he says,

"There's a basement. That's where they. Where kept us," and shrugs. "I think the operating theaters cut that way," and gestures with his head, and Tony does sort of remember a long roll in the land. He hadn't thought about it too much. It's hilly country.

"You catch that, Widow? Thor?" he asks, and gets a few moments of silence before Natasha comes online.

"Got it. Keep Clint near a comm for as long as you can. Me and Thor are in through the back way. No sign of Cap yet."

"Stairs?" Tony asks Clint, "Elevator? Escalator? Repulsor blast through the floor?" but before Clint can answer something pings on--or off. It sounds like an electronic lock, which is a sound Tony's pretty fucking familiar with, and he adjusts his grip on the briefcase and takes a few steps closer to Clint and Bruce. "Stay people Bruce," he whispers. "You too, Francis."

The figure that steps out at the end of the corridor is an older man and unassuming, but dressed sharply. If this was a different social occasion, Tony would ask after his tailor. As it is, he adjusts his grip on the briefcase a little and steps forward. Clears his throat the way he does when he has to bring his execs in line. He wishes he had Pepper on hand to play second fiddle, building up the drama of corporate power by collecting and handing things out like he's thought of every angle and has planned for it in advance.

She should be on the team. He'd bring it up with Cap when they got him him back, but he's not all that sure that Steve quite understands the power of a strong secretarial background.

"You have something," Tony says, playing CEO on his own, "that I believe belongs to me." It's easier to say that about Cap, because no one in their right mind would think that they could own Captain America. 

"Please," the man says, and it's the smooth voice from the recorded message. Tony glances at Clint to see if there's any recognition on his face, but there isn't. "Do not think of this as an abduction."

"I want to know he's okay," Tony says, exactly like he's thinking of it as an abduction, "I want proof that you even have him."

"Your _Captain_ ," he says, pronouncing the capital, "is perfectly alright. I'm not a _thief_ , Mr. Stark. This was just to get your attention." There's something about the way he says 'thief' that just pisses Tony off. Some note of holier-than-thou that he's pretty sure he can decode and _hates_. He keeps his face relaxed, his expression mild and doesn't let a hint of it through.

"I paid enough for him the first time," the man says, playing the same unperturbed business man game. Tony's well acquainted with it, and this guy is good. He even manages to get a note of gentle amusement into it, like he thinks Tony is some young upstart who's managed to buy a minor company out from under him and he's pleasantly surprised and maybe gently impressed. "But I'm willing to pay it again."

It's as patronizing as it is disgusting.

"He's not for sale," Tony snaps. He _would_ have said, _he doesn't belong to anybody, you gigantic asshole_ , but he knows the mindset. If he'd said Clint wasn't owned by anyone, the guy would probably see it as an invitation to snap him up like a cheap plot of land. The idea of Clint as _unownable_ rather than _unowned_ is probably as foreign to the bastard as may-as-well-not-exist.

The jackass continues to look amused. "Don't pretend you're above buying and selling human life, Tony Stark," the man says, with an emphasis on his name that makes it very clear that he means it as a _brand_. That what he means is as _Stark Industries_ and Stark Industry weapons, and ouch. Low blow. 

"I've moved on," Tony says lightly, even though he's never been all that sure it is possible to move on from being a dealer of death. Or a dealer of weapons that dealt death. Those things were probably pretty much the same thing.

Bruce scratches his ear and there's a _tap tap tap_ in Tony's comm that means _have contact, can't talk_ , probably for Natasha and Thor's benefit. Tony's pretty impressed that nothing has been hammered into the ground yet. God knows _he_ wants to flatten the place till it's level with the hill it's built on, but they need proof of life first. They need a _lead_. 

God, he should really have set Clint up with some kind of tracker beyond what they have hidden in his clothing and on his person. Something well hidden that they'd never find, even in a strip search. Something that wouldn't hurt him if he had to shift--

Tony says, "Proof of life or no deal," and holds a hand out for Bruce's phone and, while the guy is organizing a file send or whatever the fuck it is he's doing, manages to slide the casing open and, with it hidden in his pocket, wriggles the tracker out of it by feel. It's tiny and he's set it in an everything-proof casing, just in case Bruce should get dumped into a river or off a cliff or something. Or in case Hulk stomped on his phone. 

His phone rings. He pulls _that one_ out of his pocket and says, "Cap?" He needs to know he's okay, but he also needs a second. One second of cover. 

"Tony." He can't tell if Steve sounds alright or not. Steve's damn good at putting on a stuff upper lip. At acting like he's calm and together even when that's the furthest thing from the truth.

"Are you okay? Where are you?" 

"I'm alright," Steve says, reassuring like _they're_ the ones who need comfort. He might not be wrong, actually. "I don't know, Tony. It's--I didn't see how I got here."

"Did you try to break out?"

"Did I--? No, Tony. It didn't occur to me." It's Steve's dry sarcasm, the tone mild enough that Tony could almost take his bullshit at face value, which means he's probably closer to alright than not.

"Okay," Tony says. "Sit tight."

"Clint--"

"Sit tight."

Steve probably reads their whole plan and the stupidity of the plan in it, because he says, "Tony. Don't you dare give them--"

"Don't worry, Cap," Tony says, even though he knows that what he's about to say is going to make Steve go ballistic with worry, "We have what they want. We're getting you back."

"Don't you _dare_ ," Steve repeats, low and dangerous.

"You'll be home in no time," Tony says, and then there's a clicking on the line and the call cuts out. Tony checks his screen to make sure it's really dead, then says, "Money to my account. I don't want you walking away with both of them _and_ the cash."

The man smiles. Smug and like he wants to throw Tony's _not for sale_ back in his face, but is too polite to. Tony hates his guts. 

But he makes himself turn and grab Clint by the arm, hustling him forward and, while the guy is distracted arranging the transfer, presses the small rounded shape of Bruce's phone tracker into Clint's hand and says, "You're going with the nice man, Barton," and, when the guy doesn't take any notice of what he's saying, hisses, "Swallow it."

" _What?_ "

Tony gives him a stern look. Says, "I've made my decision," to make it sound like he's explaining the sale, and shifts to cover Clint's very un-property-like glare.

Technically, in his stomach is outside his body proper. The tracker shouldn't be able to hurt him even if he shifts. Won't travel through muscle the way Tony fears an implant might and it's too small to blow out his intestine or anything. Clint just needs to catch the fuck on, but he's not at his sharpest at the moment, so Tony repeats, low and cautious, facing away from the guy and trusting Bruce to watch his back, "Swallow it, Clint."

Clint glances over Tony's shoulder and then does it, and just in time because Tony's phone beeps an incoming message and he's suddenly several million richer. 

As if he needs it.

Nat says, into his earpiece, "We're in the basement. It's--Jesus, Clint." 

Clint can't hear her without his earpiece. Tony's suddenly very aware that he's just traded-slash-sold Black Widow's best friend and that she probably won't be impressed at any size cut of the compensation. _Tony_ is kind of impressed at the size of the compensation. In a sick, gut-wrenching kind of way. 

For a guy who never takes his turn at the housework, Clint's worth a surprisingly pretty penny. 

"This will be funny later," Tony tells Bruce, and pulls Clint a step over. Maybe very, _very_ later.

Clint says, "Fuck. _Fuck_ ," and " _Tony_ \--" in what sounds like sudden panic before he bites it off and goes very still, like he's frozen up, and Tony can't say he wasn't expecting--or at least fearing--something like this, but there's nothing he can say or do in front of the guy even though they all know that this act is an act and none of them believe the other. 

There's some kind of clanking over the comm, and Thor saying something in a low, questioning voice. Natasha answers in tight, angry tones, and Tony has a horrified curiosity about that basement, even though he's sure there's no chance that something down there might dilute the things he's imagined after seeing the scars on Clint's lion skin. 

He simultaneously wants to ask Natasha to fill him in and raze the place to the fucking ground. 

"Bye, Clint," Tony says to let them know what's happening and hears Nat and Thor go still, listening. Clint's face twitches, but not into any particular expression. Tony can hear him breathing, a little shallow, a little fast. 

"What--" Clint starts, and looks over questioningly. Not at him or Bruce, but at the man in the suit. "Where are we going?"

"Where's Captain America?" Tony demands, cutting in. He can feel Bruce behind him, silent and angry and trying to keep a handle on it. "I think that was a part of the deal." He's pretty sure they're going to pull something, but Clint is a walking talking bugging device now. Sort of.

Unless they do something really horrific to him, but that would be a bad use of several million dollars, so Tony's betting they have some time.

"He will be released. When I've left here safely."

It's bullshit. Tony smells bullshit like he has a sixth sense for it. And so does Natasha because she points out over the comm, "There's only one of him. We could grab him and make him talk." 

And his people could kill Steve. Or severely harm him. Or simply move him somewhere else secluded and hard to find. They obviously have resources. Tony scratches the side of his head, taking the opportunity to tap a negative against his comm. And anyway. Tony's not at all convinced that he _is_ alone. Especially if the facility sprawls out underground the way Clint had suggested.

"My shifter," money suit prompts, and Clint takes a step and stops again and fuck. Tony can't believe they're doing this to him. That they're going along with this even if it was Clint's plan. Clint's plans suck. They should veto them on principle. He's going to suggest that to Cap, first thing. As soon as they get him back. Right after he has to tell him that yeah, he went and traded Clint for Steve's return anyway. 

Sort of. In a way. As part of a _plan_.

If this goes sideways, he could actually end up down two Avengers.

 _Fuck_ Clint's plans.

"I can't believe we're just going to stand here," Bruce says, as Clint crosses the room. Tony can't read his face, but he can see the determined set of his shoulders as he lets his wrists be zip tied. Clint can probably fox his way out of that, and Tony hopes to hell that the guy isn't completely up to speed on everything that Clint's capable of even though that's probably unlikely, considering.

"We're not just standing here," Tony says, "We're getting Cap."


	21. Chapter 21

Because they're Avengers, the first thing they do is spend five minutes arguing. As soon as the door at the end of the hall closes and locks--again with that smooth mechanical click--Thor and Natasha become an indignant babble in his ear and Bruce is shouting all the objections he _could_ have brought up before, while they were at the tower and Clint was winning them all over onto the side of reckless lunacy. 

Tony says, "I know, I know," because that should cover the lot of them, and adds, "Fuck," as he and Bruce navigate a stairway that twists downwards into semi-darkness. Someone has a light on down here, and he hopes to hell it's Nat and Thor because he hasn't put his suit on yet. Is still toting it around like so much take-home work. 

Downstairs, the place looks even more like a cross between office and hospital. There's long corridors, what looks like a secretary or nurses' station and smoke-blackened swing doors of the sort Tony associates with operating theatres. It also looks like someone's set a bomb off. The streaks of soot are darker and thicker than upstairs, and the air still smells sharp and acrid as well as damp and musty. There's rotting, charred carpet underfoot where there isn't heat-curled linoleum and what furniture there is looks half-burnt. The light isn't Natasha, or anyone else. It's coming from dirty glass panels set in high recesses--skylights--and blocked with steel grates. It's murky illumination at best. 

"Spooky," Tony says. It's like walking on the bottom of a neglected aquarium. He tells Bruce, "I think I've seen this movie," and tosses him back the pieces of his phone to reassemble on his own, in case something happens and they need him to have a dial-tone, even if he's no longer traceable through it. Tony makes a mental note to stick a tracker to Bruce's pants when they're back on the jet. It would probably be difficult to lose a giant green rage monster, but lately he's been setting a pretty impressive record for Avenger loss and misplacement. "Don't open any doors or go looking for the attic. It's always the nosy ones that get everyone else killed."

Bruce doesn't comment. He probably thinks the monster flick joke is out of place, even though, really, where would it be more appropriate? The place makes Tony's skin crawl and he isn't entirely sure it's just because of what he's gathered from Clint's heart-to-hearts of confusion and disjointed overshare. The ceiling is black, with burnt panels half-hanging and, in places, fallen out, and if makes the place seen even darker and more oppressive, at least the fire doesn't seem to have damaged the basic infrastructure too badly. 

Judging by how the place is still standing, anyway.

There's a clank at the end of a hall and Bruce gives him a tight smile and loosens his tie a little, but if it's because he's freaking out or getting ready to turn green isn't entirely clear. Tony calls, "Thor?" and it's probably a bad idea to be loud, but keeping their voices down is making the place feel even creepier. 

"Stop yelling," Natasha scolds in his ear. He can hear more clanking in the background. It sounds like Thor is trying to dismantle the place.

They turn a corner and there's light spilling from behind the fogged glass of the double swing doors at the end of the hall. The whole corridor has doors opening off it, on both sides, and Tony doesn't-- _doesn't_ \--check any of them, even if Bruce lingers a little bit and maybe tries a door knob every so often, giving them a reluctant little jiggle as they walk past. They're mostly all locked and the few that open look like they were offices, set up with desks and filing cabinets, but one looks like some kind of holding cell, steel doored and unfurnished. Tony's glad Bruce doesn't try any more than that because he's quickly coming to his limit of things he wants to know about this place or at least, to the limit of questions he wants his brain to start turning over.

Had reached that limit before they'd ever got here, really.

"Well," Tony says, as he pushes through the swing doors at the end of the hall and into a what looks a lot more like an expansive lab than an operating theatre, "Everyone assemble and stuff. What's left of you, anyway." There's broken glass on the floor, and notebooks strewn about, their pages curled from age and moisture. Bruce, of course picks through them, adjusting his glasses as he peers at the faded, run ink. Squinting in the watery light that's spilling in through a cracked and grown-over skylight, too high above to reach and again protected by a steel grate. To prevent escape, Tony thinks, and decidedly stops examining the details of the place.

The clanking is, as expected, Thor. He's exploring a row of solid doors along one end of the lab, slamming his way in and out of them like he thinks there's someone that might need rescue still locked up inside. They look like the holding cell Bruce had found off the hall, heavy duty and reinforced, but these have cage-like chutes for entry and exit as well as the door. Reminiscent of any number of big animal enclosures, and Natasha looks just as fascinated, but in a quiet stormy way. She's just standing there watching as Thor slams another door before stalking into the next cell. They look utterly empty. Whatever equipment there might have been is mostly gone from the place. Other than the mundane mess of beakers and tube racks and fume hoods, the lab's been stripped. Someone must have come back to clean up--To get rid of bodies too, probably considering the scope of the fire damage--but there's still enough here to raise the hair on the back of Tony's neck. It looks like the backroom of some zoo's vet facility. Some _shady_ zoo's vet facility.

Bruce tosses a notebook back to a counter and rubs his fingers together like he flicking filth off them, then jams that hand into the pocket of his jacket. Bruce, of all people, is probably not the best guy to take along into a former human experimentation lab that they aren't particularly intending to stamp into dust, but at least there's not going to be any accidentally stomping _them_ into dust, because Bruce looks pale and sick rather than angry and looks more and more so the more he compulsively pokes around the place.

"I promised him this wouldn't happen," Natasha says without turning, somehow knowing exactly when Tony gets into earshot, watching as Thor exits the last cell in the row and comes stalking back. "I promised him this wouldn't hurt him again."

"Yeah, well," Tony says, "I promised him no labs, so join the club."

\-----

The other end of the structure isn't as gutted. It's still smoke damaged and musty, and infested with small animals, but it also doesn't feel like the ceiling is about to cave in. There's no sign Steve was ever anywhere here, which doesn't surprise Tony at all. It's not like the whole set-up didn't reek of trap or trick from the get-go. It's not like Tony wasn't suspicious of it the second Steve _didn't_ appear for an on-site trade. 

Or like he wasn't suspicious of it before. Directing them to a ruin wasn't exactly the most above-board move. It says shady and secret and home field advantage, but what exactly that advantage is, Tony isn't sure, unless they just wanted to make use of their escape tunnel bolt hole which seems to be the only part of this building in any kind of working order.

The collection of blips on his phone screen that mean _Clint_ is moving away, not fast enough yet to be in any kind of vehicle, but Tony doesn't doubt that that's coming, and soon. Or that those blips will reduce to one in short order, because he's pretty sure that the trackers they have hidden in Clint's clothing--in his jacket lining and in his left boot sole and other places--won't last that long. Mostly because he's pretty sure that Clint's _clothes_ won't last that long. Will probably be discarded or destroyed before they even leave the compound, rather than waste time searching through them and risk missing something.

"I've still got him," Tony tells the team, when the first of those blips goes dark, followed by the others, until there's only the one labeled like it's still indicating Bruce. That one holds steady and it looks they won't need to Hulk-tear through that door or some walls or that door _and_ some walls, and abort after all and that's almost a shame, because Tony _wants to_.

"Tony made him swallow the tracker from my phone," Bruce explains, not really approvingly, when Natasha checks the readout over his shoulder then looks at Bruce in question. Probably over the little flag reading _Banner_.

"It's _broadcasting_ ," Tony points out, holding up his phone and waving it around even though that makes it harder for Nat to see the little blip that is Clint. "It's working. I came up with it on the fly." He doesn't say, _neat, huh?_ because Natasha doesn't look like she's likely to agree with that assessment just right then. "Let's remember that this whole thing was Clint's idea," he reminds them, "and I'm just running disaster mitigation."

"Nice work," Natasha tells him sarcastically, but Tony's pretty sure she doesn't mean it the way it sounds because even if it is a bit early to really tell how the mitigating is going on this one, it's not like he's fucked it up yet either. He's starting to say so when Bruce decides to try the handle of what looks like a supply closet and instead finds a staircase, metal and narrow and rattly like a fire escape.

"Huh," Natasha says, when Bruce calls them over to peer into the darkness with him, "Ten bucks says this won't be anything good."

"We could vote on this," Tony agrees, "All in favor of not checking it out, go back to the jet."

Bruce says, "You go first," and Tony can tell he doesn't mean the jet. He's still looking down the narrow staircase into the dark. 

"You have the light," Natasha adds in support. Of Bruce.

"Steve's not down there," Tony points out, and takes a second to check his phone to make sure _Clint_ isn't either. Who knew what kind of warren could be another layer under the place. _This_ layer is already more sprawling than he would have guessed from the look of the dental clinic above. "And I don't think we want to know what's down there." It could just be mops and buckets, but it's pretty unlikely. Their luck just hasn't been swinging that way. "What did I say about the nosy ones, Bruce?" Tony demands, letting himself be nudged out onto the tiny landing. The metal clangs under his feet." And since when do you want answers? You were the one who said 'leave it alone', and the minute I _want_ to leave it alone--"

"I'm right behind you," Bruce assures him, even though it's Natasha who steps out after him when he takes the first step down, undoing his shirt another button or two despite himself, to let more arc reactor light through.

"I don't like this," he protests, even as he lets her nudge him down another step, "We should be going after Clint."

"We have to give him a head start," Bruce says, "Keep going."

"I don't _like_ this."

Without Cap, team decisions are apparently made based on peer pressure and Russian rib-poking. Tony swats her and takes another step and tightens his grip on the case. He only needs about ten seconds to suit up, but the Iron suit probably isn't going to protect him from seeing things he can't unsee. "Why don't you have a light anyway?" he asks Natasha, "How are you spying around when you're less equipped than a boy scout?"

"I'm equipped," Natasha snips, feet nearly silent behind him. The arc reactor doesn't really give off enough light for proper spelunking. It's really doing a lot more to fuck with his night vision than anything. 

"You don't have a _flashlight_ ," Tony points out, using a hand to shield his face from the blue glow while using the other to thumb his phone screen on then hands it up to her to use as one. His next step finds what feels like concrete and he grips Natasha's wrist to direct the light downwards. It looks like they've hit the bottom, a plain concrete floor. Behind them, the stairs rattle as Thor and maybe Bruce start after them.

"Oh, now that I'm down here, you all want to come along." Tony says, even as Thor comes to a halt maybe two steps down. Probably realizing that the little space below would be more than cozy if all of them decide to be curious Bruces. 

"I see shelves," Natasha reports up to Bruce, leaning over the banister to direct her light around the small space. "Out of my way, Tony."

"It's _books_ ," Tony says, when he steps away from the stairs and his arc reactor lights up the walls of the place. There's binders on the shelves. Not many and they're as scattered as the notebooks up in the lab above, but they're in better shape, project logo dark against the colorful spines of office supply red and orange and yellow, turned muddy by the blue light cast from his chest. He pulls one out and flips through it absently, then hands it back to Natasha to pass to Bruce. Hears him leafing through it somewhere above while Natasha pushes past to go poking into dark corners.

"Jars," she reports from behind the deeper shadows behind the stairs and if anything is a signal to beat it back to the jet, _that_ has to be, but Bruce instead takes it as an excuse to come a little further down into the small store room. Tony would really be expecting Bruce to be a little less comfortable with the circumstances, but he seems to be in some kind of Professor Banner mode, adjusting his glasses and scanning the pages set in the binder with a tight-lipped expression that could mean anything, but doesn't look like any kind of distress. Even though _jars_ can't be anything any of them want to look at.

Or maybe not, because Bruce hands the binder up to Thor, and comes clattering the rest of the way down the stairs, and Tony snaps, "Are you forgetting something? Two somethings? Two somethings we'd like to get back?"

Natasha waves the phone with the tracker screen still up and says, "He's still close", and steps back where Tony can see her to give Bruce access.

"I'd like to know what we're dealing with," Bruce says, flicking his own phone on. Tony can see the little rectangle of light as the rest of Bruce disappears into the space Natasha had just vacated. He doesn't shadow meld as easily as she does and Tony can see the white of his shirt, turned a pale blue by the combination of arc reactor glow and electronic screen. There's a bit of a glint of pale light off the frame of his glasses. 

"We're dealing with cat napping," Tony says, "And Cap napping." And horrific aspersions on his character, but Bruce isn't likely to consider that in as being in quite the same category. 

Bruce doesn't answer, but a second later he takes a quick step back and says, "Oh," in a surprised tone. Maybe a horrified one, and Tony had seen _that_ coming a mile away, not that anyone listened to his warnings.

"Go ahead. Go ahead, Bruce, and share with the class. It just better not be Clint's eye floating in there."

\-----

It's not. Of course it's not. But it _is_ a collection of animals and animal parts, preserved old-style in a way that reminds Tony of the store rooms of old university biology labs. Cluttered shelves with glass jars in an assortment of sizes and yellowed labels hand lettered in ink. 

"Tell me this isn't--" Tony starts, and Bruce quickly says,

"No. Jesus, Tony."

"Jesus, _Tony?_ " It's not like it takes a giant leap of imagination to jump to the conclusion of _shifter parts_ , but Bruce seems confident that that's not the case and Tony's not particularly interested in challenging him on it, even if he's pretty sure this is just one of many collections of creepy and that the others are maybe more traumatic. Or really, almost certainly more traumatic. He's not about to go on a hunt for them, though. Not like _Bruce_. "I'm not the one who's all _interested_."

Bruce doesn't answer. He just keep rummaging like he thinks this closet is going to give up useful answers.

Natasha fiddles with the phone and says, "We need to get back to the jet," in a low quiet voice and Tony lets his breath out--either in relief that they're leaving, or concern that _Clint_ is, he's not sure which--and goes to move Bruce along, taking the few steps behind the stairs and towards the shelves of jars. Whatever's in them looks even more disturbing cast in arc reactor blue than they probably would otherwise. He can catch bits of bone and fur and the rubbery look of preserved internal organs and _really_ how can Bruce be calmly sorting through it when--

"Tony," Bruce whispers, pulling a jar out from the rear of the shelf, and shuffling others back to make room for it at the front. Tony gives it a glance from the corner of his eye and sees the sphinx logo on the label rather than hand written letters. 

"Yep. Time to go," he says, and plucks his phone out of Natasha's hand to check Clint's whereabouts. He's beyond the perimeter of the compound now, still moving at a walk's pace, which probably means that the locked exit tunnel comes up out in the woods somewhere. There's going to be a car, or a helicopter parked near where ever they come up. Nothing that the quinjet can't catch up with like child's play.

"What _is_ that?" Natasha asks, and won't let Tony hustle her back up the stairs even though _she's_ the one who'd said _need to go_. 

Tony gives up and looks. And yeah. Can't unsee _that_.

"Thor should be here," he says, because it's unfair as hell that _Thor_ gets to miss out on this when they'd pretty much shoved _him_ down here to use as a human flashlight. "Then this can be a real team thing."

"It looks like--" Bruce starts, and Tony says,

"Yeah." 

It looks like something half on this side of some species line, and half on the other. A not-really-formed twist of fur and elongated...fingers. Toes, maybe. It's hard to make out, exactly, with the distorting quality of the glass and the liquid inside the glass and the lack of more than halfway decent illumination. It might be less disturbing if he could make it out better, but somehow Tony doubts it. He can make out the dark slit of a closed eye and that's _it_. 

"We're _going_ ," he tells Bruce, "I don't know what the fuck they're trying to make or do or compile, but they have Clint. And Steve. And I don't _care_ what for."

\-----

Thor takes the binder with him, probably because no one had told him why they were handing it to him in the first place and then failed to notice that he still had it until they were at the jet and Tony was routing the tracker feed to a larger monitor rather than have the team huddle around his phone like it's the world's smallest campfire. Clint's indicator is moving faster but not too fast, which probably means car. It should be easy to follow, but the quinjet is too obvious a tail and would overtake a land bound vehicle too quickly, so there's not much they can do but keep cooling their heels and watch the little spot gain distance.

"Well," Tony says to Thor, "You can set Barton's Hawkeye set back down, I guess," then, when Thor tosses the binder onto a seat so he can unsling Clint's quiver and bow from over his shoulder, says, "You brought things along? Never bring things along. This is how people wind up haunted," but Bruce is already taking the advantage of the improvement in lighting situation to leaf more carefully through the pages. Tony tries not to crane his neck around to catch glimpses, but he still sees enough to make out diagrams and schematics and even if Bruce is the nosy one it doesn't mean Tony likes to be left in the dark.

"I think it's a weapons program," Bruce says, "of some kind," and Bruce would know, probably from having been an experiment in a weapons program. He sounds very even, even though talking about that kind of experimentation had practically made him drop his beakers back at the tower. "Or at least, they're focusing on anima--shifts. With specific tactical advantages," then swallows. Says, "Predators. Flight." 

Tony says, "No hulking on the plane."

Bruce ignores it and turns the page and then the next, and then says, "I think we might be in over our heads, Tony. There's _four_ of us, and this looks really organized."

"There's _six_ of us, and what? More over our heads than with the mutant shark thing?" SHIELD had taken care of the shark thing, but Tony's willing to count it as a team-versus-adversity victory if it'll keep morale up. "No more bad feelings. You should have had your suspicions before we let Clint decide things."

"On the move," Natasha cuts in, and points to the screen where Clint's indicator is accelerating. Tony flicks the engines on.

"That wasn't an _organization_ of shark things," Bruce says, and turns another page.

Tony considers the blip again and decides Clint doesn't have enough distance on them yet. This waiting is killing him. "So you want what? _Our_ organization of shark things?" The last thing he wants is to help Clint's secrets leak any further than they already had. Unless it becomes dire. Or more dire. There's probably a threshold of dire beyond which he'd be willing to call Fury and fill him in and maybe even beg for help, secret tigers and failure to report Steve's abduction be damned, but he's pretty sure they haven't passed it yet.

But they pass _something_ when Natasha, hanging over the back of Bruce's chair, says, "What _is_ that?" and Bruce reads,

"Experiment status: failed. Details itemized in table four point two three," and actually turns the pages to find it.

"Oh my god," Tony says, and can't help but check the position of Clint's blip again, then goes to hover over Bruce and peer around the obstruction that is his head, even as his own mouth says, "Stop looking at that thing." The diagrams in the binder remind him of the jar-thing, but in line drawing form and with labeled parts and notes. Like some kind of psycho's field guide, animal parts jumbled and warped in a way that Tony hopes to fuck means that jar-thing and any other possibly existent jar-things had never been fully alive.

It makes him really fucking glad that Clint _is_ still alive. At least for the time being. 

The blip heads North, then West, turning onto a highway, which means it will be out of tree cover soon if it isn't already and easier to keep a visual on. "If I knew we were going to be chasing a _car_ ," Tony says, "I would have brought my slower jet."

Bruce could be right about the shark organization, though. If Cap is hurt, or Clint is by the time they catch up, or Cap _and_ Clint are, then they're likely to be at a slight disadvantage.

"Or I could have brought my slower suit," Tony says, getting up and turning the pilot's seat over to Natasha so he can poke at his phone. It rings for half a minute before it picks up and as soon as it does Tony says cheerfully, "Rhodes. Are you busy right now? And for the foreseeable short term future?"


	22. Chapter 22

As it turns out, Rhodes _is_ busy, but not so busy that he doesn't duck out of where ever he is to hiss "Tony. Are you okay?" 

"Why is that the first thing you always ask?" Tony snips back. Rhodey's suspicious what-are-you-up-to tone is totally unjustified. _Clint's_ gotten them into this. Or Clint and Cap. Or Clint's jackass brother, if he looks at it in a zoomed-out long game kind of way. "I'm not part of the trouble, I'm part of the from-trouble extrication party, I'll have you know."

He hears Rhodey sigh. There's a clack that sounds a lot like a latch. "Are you hiding in a bathroom stall to talk to me?" Tony asks, "That's a really impressive security precaution. No one will overhear you now," and hears Rhodey sigh again.

"You are in trouble," he says and it's not a question. More like he's so resigned to the inevitability of it that it's not even really a conclusion. Tony grins into the phone, then sees Natasha scowling at him and shrugs. Tries to explain the purpose of the call to her through a series of one-handed gestures, pointing at the phone and then miming Iron Suit flight positions, pointing his open palm downwards, then repeats the sequence when Natasha doesn't get it and makes _what the hell, Tony_ faces at him. 

"I hear engines," Rhodey says.

"That would be because we're on a stake-out in the jet." 

The Clint-blip is still broadcasting and still moving west. They've been watching it for a good couple hours at least and that's enough time for any number of things to be done to Clint. Any number of things could have been done to Clint before they'd even taken left the lab. "In the jet?" Rhodes says, like he's imagining it parked across the street from some shady apartment or like he thinks Tony's just talking shit at him. 

"Details," Tony says, "Never mind. We won't be in this woods for much longer anyway."

"Where the hell are you, Tony?" Rhodey probably thinks he means a metaphorical woods, "What's going on?"

"We have a--a _dog_ situation." There's the sound of knocking and voices and then of the bathroom door unlocking and footsteps. It sounds like he's exited into the hall. "Beating a hasty retreat?" Tony asks, "Men's room compromised?"

"Hold on" Rhodey says and there's more footsteps. Clint's blip slows, then turns, exiting a freeway maybe. 

"I know you said not to get mixed up in it," Tony starts, and hears a door close. 

"Go ahead."

"And I'm not asking you to go digging for anything." It's kind of a flimsy assurance, considering the situation, and maybe more than a little obsolete when they've spent the day ass-deep in _mixed up_. "I think we may be a little past that." 

There's silence for a minute, which is probably Rhodey internally debating the merits of chewing him out. He probably decides against it, or at least decides to postpone it or wait until he has more intel, because when he speaks again what he says is, "What's happening, Tony? What _dog_ situation?" 

That's apparently code now. Clint will be thrilled.

"A Sphinx type dog situation. They've got him and Cap. We're in Virginia."

Rhodey says, "Tony," in an apologetic tone that doesn't mean he won't help, but probably _I'm not anywhere near Virginia_ or maybe _I'm stuck doing colonel things right now_.

"Don't sweat it. We're out of here in five anyway. But maybe hang near the clubhouse--you know the one I mean. It's downtown. It has my name on the side--just on the off-chance that we need back-up. You know how to get into the you-know-where to get your you-know-what." Natasha gives him an incredulous look for that, but it's not like she and Clint don't have secret handshakes or semi-creepy platonic sleep over dates or whatever their in-club membership high-five is.

There's silence for a second and then Rhodey says, "Tony--"

"Yeah," Tony interrupts, "I know."

"I'm never helping you find anything out ever again." 

"And I'm never asking you _how_ you found anything out. About this. Or I am. Because _fuck_ , Rhodey."

There's a knock in the background. There's someone at his door. Rhodey says, "Send me a flier if you don't find your dog." and, "Don't do anything stupid."

"Yeah, yeah," Tony says, "Just letting you know; if I'm not back by dinner tomorrow, we've been. You know. Eaten by large mammals or something," and hangs up. Clint's blip turns again and goes back to traveling at highway speeds and Tony would really expect a secret laboratory to have a helicopter or something, but they're probably trying to fly under the radar.

"So," Tony says, considering the blip's progress for another second before turning back to the team, "Let's split up."

\-----

Bruce and Natasha aren't down with the plan, but that's probably because Bruce is rarely down with plans that aren't what he calls _completely thought out_ and Natasha doesn't approve of being parked in the jet while half the remaining team heads out. Thor, on the other hand is completely for it, because Thor is on _his_ half of the team. The can-fly-without-jet-assistance half. 

"And I think you two can handle babysitting the jet. We'll call when we know anything. And it's your turn to be left out of Clint and Thor related daytrips anyway. You can read the monstrous book of monsters with Bruce while you wait."

"You're attempting espionage?" Natasha asks dubiously, and there's a definite _without me?_ in there. 

"Or stealthy tailing," Tony offers, and shrugs out of his suit and shirt, leaving him in the close-fitting bodysuit that's way more comfortable under the _other_ suit than bunchy fabrics, and gestures the rest of them back so he can pop the briefcase. Natasha rolls her eyes and turns back to watching the tracking screen.

Bruce says, "Is this the best idea, Tony?"

"What about any of this has been a best idea?" The whole scheme's been a _worst_ idea. Starting with Cap's decision to leave their hawk's eye view out of that last gig and get himself absconded with.

"Stealthy?" Natasha pipes back up and looks between him and Thor, without any expression on her face, but Tony's learned to read the nuance of her diplomatically blank looks and knows an insult when he sees it.

"I'm sure we can manage stealthy," Tony says, and activates the suit.

\-----

They manage stealthy just fine and even their following is decent, if Tony does say so himself, and even if Thor's landings are made of something a little more emphatic than silent grace. As long as they keep their distance and a low altitude, they're fine. It's not like a U-haul is likely to be equipped with anything that can pick them out of the topography of hills and treetops anyway, if it's equipped with sneaky gear and counter sneaky gear at all.

Trailing it turns out to be as tedious as waiting its progress out might have been, because they have to catch up in jumps and spurts to keep from getting too close. Waiting for tens of minutes at a time is still a pain and Thor's hammer helicopter power-up gets old a lot faster than Tony would have thought. He's sort of annoyed to have to delay his own launch while Thor completes twenty revolutions or however many it is that it takes to wind him up enough for lift-off.

The hopping along takes them through towns and back out into the country and finally to an expansive property, with a large wooded area that clears abruptly to reveal tidy grass and charming walks. It comes up on Tony's head-up displays long before they get there, but the minute it does, he just knows that's where they're heading. The size of the lawns alone is disquieting, which is probably a sign that he's had too many conversations with Clint about his off-the-books country living youth. 

Hawkeye-induced alarm bells aside, the place is pretty nice. They've got what looks like stables, a really tasteful mansion and on one end of the property, they've got their own charming cottage-y looking clinic thing. The place looks like an upscale convalescent facility, or maybe a super rich people rehab-and-vacation getaway spot, and the lengths they've gone to to make the place look welcoming instead of just hidden and non-threatening really just makes it feel more sinister. It's not like his inevitable Jar Thing nightmares are going to be any less Jar Thing-ish just because the project that spawned it has a few friendly ponies and artfully arranged beds of seasonal flowers.

There's a definite perimeter, staked out yards away from the lawns and marked by regular _no trespassing_ notices and, somewhat more hidden, electronic eyes. Which means that Natasha and Bruce are going to have to keep a more careful distance than they might otherwise and also that there's probably an extensive security system that needs hacking--or at least needs it's CCTV footage looped--before he and Thor can commence their traipsing and snooping.

At least it's getting dark. That always helps with the snooping. And the traipsing. And the poking around where poking isn't wanted. And it'll provide cover for trying to hide aircraft in a wood. It's a bit sparser here than back at the lab. Or back at the burnt out _other_ lab, since this place is obviously not some kind of fancy chiropractor--ivy overgrown clinic building aside. The kidnapping, hostage taking, and attempts to purchase human life kind of blows the cover.

"I'll bet you five bucks they have him underground," Tony says, reporting over the comm Five is kind of a coward bet, but even if he's made millions from selling Clint off there's no reason to spend it all in one place. "Cap, too. They have the little dentist office thing going again. I bet this place is like a groundhog colony."

"Groundhog?" Thor asks, looking like he's trying to decide if it's a creature that might pose serious threat, and really there is a _context_ here. Unless Asgard has no burrow dwelling rodents he really should be keeping up. 

"Fine. Don't take the bet. I'm cheating anyway. I have him on my livecam." Or he has a little blinky dot, but close enough. Thank god for all the trouble Hulk causes and all the types of debris he's feared Bruce could bury himself under. His tracker could signal through layers of _concrete_ and that might not be healthiest thing for the non-pre-irradiated among them to be carrying around close to their bodies--or in their bodies, as the case might be--but it's probably the better side of the bargain when balanced against whatever it is they want Clint back for. 

"Don't do anything," Natasha orders, "until we get there."

"Late to the party, late to--"

"Don't. Do. Anything."

" _Fine_. But remember how long they've had Steve. He could be half octopus by now."

He hears Bruce sigh over the sound of accelerating engines. "He was fine earlier."

"He _sounded_ fine earlier," Tony snaps, because that's not nearly the same thing and also because he hates waiting. He'd ditched the jet to _avoid_ waiting and now they're waiting again, but in woods and shrubbery and as fast as the jet is, Bruce and Nat are going to have to hoof it over from where ever they find to set down and that might take time on top of the search for a decent parking spot. It's not ideal for a quick getaway or--god forbid it turns out to be necessary--evacuating their wounded. 

And that possibility becomes more of a probability the longer that they sit around. 

"JARVIS," Tony says, and Natasha cuts in with,

"I said _wait_."

Thor doesn't look like he disapproves of taking action, but he's had his turn at breaking and entering--or sneaking and entering--and in a fair world, Bruce would be here to mess up security systems with him, but the closest Tony can come to just task division is to leave Thor hanging in the bushes while he gets on with his unauthorized film editing, hijacking one of the electronic eyes and using it to let himself into the system.

"I _am_ waiting," Tony says, but mostly because he can't really do anything until it's fully dark or the security film loop won't be good for more than maybe forty minutes. It's not getting dark _that_ fast, but the light is changing quickly enough that it'd make any time discrepancy damn obvious. In the meantime--

Tony turns his comm to receive-only, then says, "JARVIS," and flips his faceplate up so he can give Thor a _keep your mouth shut_ meaningful look. "Get into their security. See what they have. And see whose birthday they're using to key their security system."

"We should rest," Thor says, when Tony's done giving JARVIS instructions, and as much as Tony hates it, he's right. They've been going full steam since losing Steve, and there's no telling when they'll be able to take a real breather. 

He says, "Only until the light's gone," and Thor grunts in assent.

\-----

It doesn't take all that long for that to happen, but by the time it does his body's settled out of the adrenaline it had been running on and protests the return to action. He can't remember the last time he ate anything. Bruce and Natasha are on the way and checking in frequently--more, Tony suspects, to make sure that he and Thor are sitting pretty than to confirm potential landing zones and it's a pretty sad cover. It's not like Natasha's ever had a problem finding her own quinjet landing pad and she's got a better vantage point from above than he and Thor have from under tree-cover anyway.

Clint's blip has been still for awhile. Even with the map zoomed in far enough to detect human-scale movement instead of vehicle-scale, he hasn't gone far. Tony's watched him go about a hundred yards, tool around and then move back down the same hundred yards at least twice and that at least gives a clue as to what and where some of the architecture is: holding cell, hall, lab. There's been a few forays off that hall, but they're a bit more mysterious. Showers, maybe. If Sphinx is bothering to use those kinds of dehumanization tactics, then he can bet Clint doesn't have his Hawkeye duds anymore and maybe has even had an unflattering haircut on top of his hose-down.

"Find me a way in and loop some footage," he tells JARVIS, "relevant cameras only. I don't want suspicious inactivity on their feed anywhere that's going to give up away."

The Iron Suit is great, but it's not exactly spy-wear and Tony would step out of it, except neither is his body suit and the armor at least has fire power. And sturdy foot protection. If only Barton were available to help spring himself that would be helpful as _hell_ , but at least the monster project still loves its bolt holes, because if Clint had exited Dental Clinic One somewhere in the woods, the data JARVIS digs up and returns shows that _this_ clinic has a similar emergency exit--emergency entrance, if they repurpose it--out in _their_ woods.

He and Thor sneak their way towards it, cutting out further into the trees until they see what looks like the doors to someone's cellar. Just steel swing doors, set into the ground at an angle and secured with a rusty padlock. "Because that's not painfully obvious considering there's no house," Tony says, and Thor twists the bolt off for him and pulls the doors open to reveal another set of doors, but these look they belong on a safe. Or on a SHIELD do-you-have-clearance airlocked lab.

The combination of security and its being abandoned way out here gives Tony a bad feeling. "Wouldn't you guard this?" he says to Thor, and makes sure his comm is sending as well as receiving now. He's really glad he set up his Rhodey safe call.

"Too suspicious," Thor says, "If my stronghold were disguised, I would place my men inside."

"Great." That could mean alarms. He hopes they're automatic rather than manual, because JARVIS can take care of _automatic_ but if someone hits a giant gong or yells into a bullhorn or something, they could be in major trouble. "Get me the open sesame and convince them I scanned an iris," he tells JARVIS and a minute later--a full minute. They're good or JARVIS is slipping--the keypad beep-bops and the eye-scanner lights up and hums. Out in the dark woods, the green glow of it is a little creepy.

And then the door hisses and pops up from its frame a little. "Be my guest," he says to Thor, and gives a gentlemanly after-you wave towards the handle. 

Thor looks doubtful. He's probably not worried about the possibility of having to hammer things though and it only takes him a second to wrap his Mjolnir-less hand around it and pull. The door opens slowly, but smoothly. It probably weighs a ton and that's pretty ineffective design for an _escape_ hatch. 

"Ten minutes," Natasha says into his ear, out of nowhere, making him jump because he doesn't even _hear_ the jet. Not even now that he's really listening for it.

"We found a thing," Tony says, "We're going in."

" _Tony_."

"Your dog walking buddy's already opened the door."

Natasha says, "Tony," again, but this time it's an exasperated sigh. 

"We'll keep you in the loop."

He doesn't wait to hear her _be careful_ -s or anything Bruce might chime in with. The stairs going down are concrete, and lit with harsh lighting, glarey and too-bright in a way that reminds him of service tunnels. Or maybe the subway at night. That desolate feeling and the things being underground thing are never a good combination. It's like some kind of serial killer's basement. Or wine cellar.

Or--

What it looks like is a prison. The walls are made out of thick concrete block and the lights are behind cages, which is kind of disturbing, because the bars are thick enough that Tony could swig from them. Maybe even _in_ the suit. And it's cold--Thor's breath is actually visible as he pads out ahead, Mjolnir held relaxed but ready in his hand--and he can't think of even one reason to refrigerate an escape hatch.

At the end of the hall there's another door, similar to the one to the outside, and JARVIS pops it just as easily. 

Too easily. There's no _my men inside _, and Tony starts to tell Thor that his Asgardian tactics don't translate to earthly laboratories, when he steps through the door and into a circular room that looks like it's walled with stainless steel panels. "The hell," he says, instead.__

__Clint's blip is still on, and his comm is still working. So at least nothing in the walls are signal-blocking. That reinforcement is _something_ blocking, though and Tony has the bad, bad feeling that it's to block _exit_ and not entry. He's about to share that, but Thor's already nipping off down one of the hallways that open up off the room like the spokes of a wheel._ _

__When Tony follows, it opens up into another room with more halls heading off it and then to another room. It's like being lost in an optical puzzle or like going deeper down a rabbit hole. "I hope we're done playing nesting hallways," he says, as he comes up behind Thor, "before we find ourselves in a little itty bitty hall at the center." It's pretty clear that this complex is way better funded than the last. Like Clint's mad scientists had spent the fifteen years or so since the fire stuffing their piggy banks and setting up savings accounts._ _

__Tony yanks open another door--or really, hacks it's numeric key and warily tugs it's handle--and _that_ one opens onto a catwalk that crosses the space above a dark pit, lit only by yellow safety lights and it would take a damn lot of piggy banks to buy this kind of hole in the ground._ _

__There's static in his ear and then it's followed by Bruce saying, "Tony? Where _are_ you?" _ _

__"Good question," Tony says, "Don't break too many twigs stomping around out there. That's how cowboys get themselves caught. I brushed up on my survival lore while me and Thor were sitting in a bush." The catwalk clangs under the Iron boots and he can tell Bruce and Nat are irritated by his non-narrating narration, but he's not really sure where he is in order to report properly._ _

__"Tony," Thor says, in low warning, and Tony's not sure why because all he does is hit the lights._ _

__And then he looks down._ _

__It's not Clint or Steve, but it _is_ a thing. There's no other word to describe it, but at least it's more like the mutant shark thing than Jar Thing as it stalks around the perimeter of it's prison, made of sleek muscle and covered in something rough that could be layers of scales, or just hair matted into a sort of armor. It's also huge and needle-toothed and cranky looking._ _

__"That's...let's not try to wrangle that."_ _

__"Fall back and regroup," Natasha orders. Her voice sounds tight. She probably thinks they're about to go the way of Steve and Clint. That she's about to be faced with an and-then-there-were-two moment and have to spring them all._ _

__"We're fine," Tony says, backing off the catwalk and hustling Thor back out of the--cage. That's what it obviously is. It's a fucking underground cage. They've stumbled into the worst zoo ever. "But I think we just found a bunch of reasons to not let the Hulk just tear this place apart."_ _

__"And that was going to be my whole plan," Natasha says dryly. Or maybe she's insulted by the suggestion. It's hard to decode her exact tone when he can't see what version of her not-frowning face she's doing._ _

__"It can still be your whole plan," Tony says, and calculates the number of doors coming off this room, and then the halls coming off the one before and the one before, "but you might set loose a rampaging alien wilderness."_ _

__"What--"_ _

__"And I'm not talking about Thor."_ _


	23. Chapter 23

"That's...interesting," is Bruce's hesitant reaction to the menagerie. Nothing in any of the pit cages looks much like anything in Bruce's big book of experimental horrors--all of their limbs seem to be growing out of reasonable places, for one, and seem to be of reasonable proportion. For presumed values of _reasonable_ anyway. It's not like they have any alien wildlife experience to consult.

Or really, they do, sort of, but Thor doesn't seem that interested in discussing zoology.

"It's not like I'm asking him to speak for _all_ space faring dino-creatures," Tony says, trailing Bruce, "I just said _if_ anything looks familiar."

They're working their way back to what Tony thinks of as the hub of the place--the first room that all the others were laid out in orbit to--because Bruce, despite his compulsive perusal of the monstrous manual, doesn't seem interested in space rhinos. Or at least, doesn't seem interested in being in close proximity to space rhinos or space _anything_ , apparent safety precautions and the creature's lack of jumping ability notwithstanding. Natasha seems to share his sentiments, because she's sticking with Thor, checking the layout of the place and trying to see if any of the passages lead to anything _useful_.

"Maybe nothing looks familiar," Bruce suggests, adjusting the way Clint's bow--it's funny to see him wearing it--rests across his chest and peering around like the hallway architecture is the most interesting thing about the place, "Maybe they aren't...space dinosaurs." He says that last a bit hesitantly. Like he's not keeping up with Tony's explanations, and really he probably isn't. He's probably thinking something more along of the lines of _these pit cages could hold a Hulk, maybe_ , and that might be structurally true, but mere _structure_ hasn't ever the kind of thing that could keep _them_ in. Or out. 

Except for maybe Cap, this time. Tony's a bit disappointed that he hasn't managed to rescue himself. He'd have been so impressed with Steve if he'd somehow showed up to help them out of this jam.

At the very least, Clint hasn't moved. Tony isn't sure what the activity schedule is here, but hopefully they're done for the day and leaving him alone now. It would make him much easier to retrieve if they don't have to bowl through scientists to get to him, and the quieter they can spring Clint the better. If Cap is here--and that's highly likely, because the place just _reeks_ of 'home base'--then the less warning they give of their presence the better. If Steve is moved, they're out of plan Bs. 

And thinking about covert scheming and the luck of finding at least this part of the compound quiet and empty has probably jinxed the whole shebang, because a second later Natasha is saying, "Stark?" through the earpiece. It has that too-casual tone that she uses when she wants them to not panic, which is pretty close to guaranteeing alarm. Or panic. Tony _is_ in an enclosed space with Bruce, which means in an enclosed space with a potential Hulk. 

And now, a potential monster stampede, if potential Hulk decides to knock down some walls.

"On the way," Tony says and picks up the pace, "Is it bad news for Bruce? Or would you rather have him?" There's thumping noises and Tony gets his feet off the ground, fires up his repulsors, and leaves Bruce eating dust. 

At least that answers the _Bruce safety_ question. They can revisit it if he catches up in time to face down trouble.

\-----

Trouble, it turns out is what appears to be a grizzly bear. Huge and bellowing, and shaking it's head irritably when Natasha hits it in the face with a metal chair. Thor isn't anywhere to be seen.

"You want to _shoot it_ , maybe?" Tony suggests, reversing foot position and firing himself into a hover. With the steel walls there's a danger of ricochets, but Natasha is close enough to not miss. Which, possibly, is what's working against her. All their big cat desensitization doesn't count for much when they were aware the whole time that the cat was _Clint_. None of it really translates to fur suits worn by strangers.

At least, Tony assumes that's what's going on, based on the uncanny intelligence in the way the bear moves. There's nothing lumbering or slow about the bear or the purposeful creepily human way it's rounding on Natasha. "I think you need a whip with that chair," Tony says, and thinks in the same moment that Clint should really be there to appreciate the imagery. Or, Clint should really be there to _complete_ that imagery. Clint and a big balance ball, maybe.

Some spotlights.

"Try to get behind me," he calls, zipping over, trying to dodge between them and not think about footage of bears peeling cars oven like so many cans of herring. It could probably do a number on the suit if Tony let it get its claws on him. "Where did this thing come from?" 

Thing. Guy. Critter. He'd sort it out later. 

Natasha leaps into a roll and comes up behind him and just as Tony's congratulating her on her continued survival and acrobatic finesse, a deep vibration passes under his feet, coming from somewhere beneath them. A _thump thump_ that cuts out right after. "Is that Thor? Where's Thor?" It's not Thor. Their luck just isn't that good, and there's no reason Thor would have abandoned them to go knocking around the deeper levels of the world's most fucked up pet sanctuary anyway. 

There's another thump and then a high whine. Starting so soft that it's barely audible and building in volume and frequency until Natasha is wrinkling her face and probably wishing for a helmet with the ability to control environmental factors. It's pretty neat that Tony has one. Even the bear could benefit, because it's twitching its ears back and snarling, and _really_. It's obvious it was responsible for setting off whatever the hell it is that's building up under their feet. It's not really fair for it to be so unhappy about it.

Tony takes the opportunity of the bear's hearing problems to start shoving it back towards one of the halls, half-planning to shut it into one of the pit cages. It goes without too much resistance, as the whine builds to a crescendo and then, when it's ear-splittingly loud and the bear is drooling--and hopefully Natasha's hands over her ears are shutting enough of the sound out that she _isn't_ \--it stops. With nothing more climatic than another, deeper thump.

And then the armor dies.

"Fuck. _Fuck_ ," Tony yells, suddenly stuck in place, "Widow. _Go_." It's an EMP. Or some other kind of electronics-disabling pulse. Tony's not sure if that means it's a trap or just a fail safe of some kind that's being tactically employed. By a bear. 

He'll _never_ write a report on this. Not over his dead body. 

"I'm not going anywhere," Natasha insists, and what's she going to do? Fight eight hundred pounds of camping ground scavenger with acrobatics? She's even less equipped than Tony is, in his frozen-up armor. He's at least in some form of bear vault, even if he'll probably be peeled out of it in no time. The bear's claws are already shrieking over the metal, and it's not like the suit has a lack of grooves or cracks for purchase to start prying from like the animal is nature's own can opener.

"Go ahead. Ladies first. I'll catch up."

"I'll distract him. Get out of the armor."

It's a horrible plan. First of all, Tony's pretty sure the bear is about as real as Clint's' cute dog act, and not about to be easily led away with berries or pots of honey or whatever the hell it is that Natasha thinks she has planned. And secondly, _out of the armor_ means soft and squishy with occasional crunchy bits and that's not a really advisable way to be waving oneself around under an unfriendly carnivore's nose.

"And then what? Run? I think--" He doesn't get to finish the thought, because there's a whistle and then a flash of light and he and the bear are thrown apart. 

"The hell?" Tony's not really complaining. The close-up view of giant canines was getting old a little fast, and with some distance he can concentrate on trying to get the armor up and running again. Or at least, up and semi-mobile.

"Move, Tony!" someone yells, and it's not Natasha.

He'd forgotten that Bruce had Clint's weapons. His aim is terrible, but an explosion is an explosion and it doesn't take a direct hit to make a fireball effective. It distracts the bear long enough for them to get out of the way--or would if Natasha was get-out-of-the-way inclined and Tony wasn't dragging his legs like they're encased in concrete shoes.

The bear's limping a little, so maybe Bruce had managed to give it a burn or something. Maybe it's enough to intimidate, considering the mis-match of fiery projectile weapons with tooth and claw. Maybe it's reconsidering this attack. Maybe it's--

"Bruce. Bruce, _go_. Fuck."

Bruce reaches for another arrow, then remembers that he's a _horrible_ archer and hesitates. Oh god. His plan B is to Hulk out. Tony can _feel_ him considering it. It's not like Bruce has a depth of options in his playbook. The trying to shoot thing was already pretty creative for a guy whose usual go-to scheme was _turn big and smash stuff_.

He hears Natasha yelling and running--her footsteps are loud, echoing disconcertingly in the metal room--and _she's_ still on her 'run while I distract the giant predator' thing. They're doing a _great_ job at adapting to the situation. They're getting their asses kicked by the fucking nature channel.

Although, to be fair, it's a really big bear. Bruce is going be eaten in probably around two bites. Two and half if it's a dainty eater.

Tony gets his faceplate off and starts tearing at the gauntlets. He's not going to make it. Bruce is a fucking goner, unless he transforms, and then they're _all_ fucking goners because Hulk is infrastructure-oriented in a kind of unhelpful way and the denizens of Space Zoo are unlikely to be any more visitor friendly than big-brown-and-man-eating. 

Clint could have mentioned the possibility of animal guards while he was making this plan. He really could have. 

Bear tumbles sideways, sharply, like it's been hit by side traffic in an intersection, and rolls twice before Tony is free enough from the armor to twist and see what's happening and as it turns out, Thor has really great re-appearance timing.

Tony flings a bit of leg armor away and then a knee section and then manages to get the chest plate to unlock. It hits the floor with a clang and then he's free. 

Even if that _free_ is freedom to try to fight a grizzly--or whatever else might show up--in what may as well be his jam jams. At least for the time being Thor has the bear wrestling covered. Maybe he's in practice after all the tiger wrestling, because he's herding it away from Bruce--who's still standing there with an arrow to his bowstring, frozen like he's short circuited--without any trouble. 

Tony grabs him and _hauls_ , not sure where he's dragging Bruce, other than _out of the way_. "Don't Hulk, buddy. I've got you."

"Bear," Bruce manages, after a second, stumbling along with Tony and a little bit over his own feet, "I'm shooting arrows at a bear."

" _Was_ shooting arrows at a bear. Now: Running."

Natasha grabs Bruce's other arm and he finally manages to get his feet coordinated enough that they can let go of him and trust him not to stop or face plant. "Where are we going?" Tony yells at her, perfectly happy to let Thor roll around with the grizzly. He's a god of thunder. He'd be fine. Tony's pretty sure.

"This might be a bad idea," Natasha starts, but really what else is new. 

"Great. Let's do it."

She dodges past him, leading the way down one of the halls, and then down another. Towards the bear entrance, is what Tony guesses, not out loud. She's leading them right into the den. He doesn't say that out loud, either. Not with Bruce still glancing over his shoulder and the Hulk not entirely out of the picture.

They duck into a door that leads into a different kind of hall. Narrow and low-ceilinged, and if Bruce does Hulk out, he's going to be stuck in it like a clog in a drain. For as long as it takes him to smash out the roof of the place, which might not even be a bad thing if they could keep him moving in the right direction, which isn't at all guaranteed. But for the moment, at least, they can put their backs to the door and get their breath.

"We just--" Bruce gasps, sweating and with his glasses hanging crookedly off his face, "We just abandoned Thor."

"He's fighting a bear," Tony says, "You know he's having a great time. Give me your phone. Mine got pulse blasted."

Bruce hands it over while Natasha goes over her gear, ending with a double tap at her ear and a "testing, testing," sound check. Tony rolls his eyes and mashes phone buttons, hoping to get JARVIS so he can ask him to set up a tracker feed and access his camera hack. It's not working too great, from inside the new tunnel. It's claustrophobic _and_ signal killing, but at least Tony's memory is good enough that he can call up a pretty good recollection of where Clint's blinky dot was. At least in relation to other places Clint's blinky dot had been. It's not like he'd had a proper map or anything.

"Hello?" Natasha tries, poking at the side of her head, and the next _hello_ comes through Tony's earpiece--fished out of his pocket now that he's not in the armor--and that's just insulting, considering what higher tech the disabling pulse had laid waste to. Or laid nonfunctionality to, anyway. At least Natasha's good at poking things back to life. She isn't much to write home about in the field of bear wrestling.

That it's night and getting a bit late is a plus, because it means activity is down, and the hall their tunnel opens into--after some security door finagling--is half-lit and empty. Bruce is still in his tie and rolled-up shirt sleeves, which might be able to pass as some sort of scientist camouflage, but Natasha's body suit isn't exactly medical work standard and Tony looks decidedly under dressed for the occasion. If they'd been thinking ahead properly, they could have brought along disguise lab coats.

_This_ place looks like a newer, un-burnt-out version of the _other_ place, just updated and with the marks of active habitation. Notices on walls, exit signs lit--that'll come in handy--someone's cast-off personal effects--a pen and a newspaper, folded up into a thick pad, crossword on top--on a low table in the hall. It feels a bit like they've traveled back in time instead of across Virginia and an adjacent state or two. 

Clint, where ever he is, must feel like he's traveled even further back in time. Tony would freak out on his behalf if he thought it would be any use and if he wasn't coming up on his daily limit of freaking out.

"I'd ask you to scout, Bruce," Tony starts, but Natasha steps past him.

" _I'll_ scout," she says, and points out several corners and a wall, "Watch the cameras. Don't go waltzing--"

" _Waltzing_ ," Tony sniffs indignantly, and tries his phone call again. This time JARVIS picks up and this method of breaking into the system is _much_ less than ideal, and a pain in the ass compared to suit-access, but beggars and all that. "Engaging footage loop in--"

It's moot. A siren starts to sound, followed by a lock-down warning and maybe Thor isn't so great at bear wrestling either, because he's clearly let this one get loose long enough to sound the alarm. At least the lock down means the Horror Zoo will be a little bit harder to rampage through in the event of a Hulk out even if _they'll_ still be trapped underground with Bruce's crankier counterpart, which isn't how Tony would choose to spend his weekends, normally.

Thor arrives at more or less the same time that Natasha takes down the first of the lab goons. It's a good time to panic, considering. It's not the potential for the goons to turn in alligators that's concerning, but that if they lose Clint now--if he's removed from the compound--they might never find him _and_ lose their chance at locating Cap. There's definitely a time limit on how long that tracker is likely to stay inside him--as gross a consideration as that might be--even if they can get Bruce's phone to act like it's useful. 

"There's not going to be any of those left for Clint," Tony says, when Bruce looses another arrow, right into the fray. It's probably dumb luck that he doesn't take out Natasha by mistake. With the arrow _or_ the resulting explosion.

Luck is more than enough to make the two of them a great team. They'll be fine if Tony takes Thor and uses him as a human shield--intelligent alien being shield--to duck behind and use as cover to get down the hall. Without the armor, he feels naked and soft and slow, and if this is what Clint and Natasha feel like every day, then he has a new respect for them. 

Also, a new horror.

Natasha drops into a roll, then comes up with her back to him and Thor, kicking a dropped gun over with her heel, not even looking as she does it, and the weapon might not be repulsor gauntlets but it's better than what he'd had, which was maybe spit balls, name calling, and rude gestures. "Go," she yells, not even looking over her shoulder, "If this gets really ugly, I have the Hulk."

Tony snatches the gun up and runs, sliding a little on the polished floor. "Yeah? You're usually not so thrilled about that."

\-----

They don't have much information to go on, beyond _blip marks the spot_ , so Tony leads Thor down multiple wrong turns, including into a bathroom, an office suite, and a small group of guards that Thor easily knocks down like so many bowling pins in the time it takes Tony to fire the gun twice. He frisks the unconscious for ammunition--it's so much less handy than being able to fire unlimited blasts of arc reactor produced energy--and stows them in what pockets he has. If he had more convenient JARVIS contact, he'd make a note-to-self about a more practical in emergencies under armor outfit. 

Thor doesn't ask about the apparent lack of clear direction but he's obviously not that convinced by Tony's stopping to peer through doors and around hallway corners. "I'm not lost," Tony informs him, when he catches Thor twitching impatiently. If they could travel as the crow flies--or as the mole digs, as the case might be--they'd be there by now, but the halls are like a maze. There's a lot more turns and detours than he'd expected, even if on consideration it makes some sense, since the layout is obviously designed to try to prevent jailbreak. "He's in this direction somewhere. We should be close." 

Thor doesn't look convinced, and his doubt is catching because now _Tony's_ not convinced. He can hear Thor restlessly smacking his damn hammer against his leg while Tony considers the spot that his usually pretty great and mostly reliable visual memory insists should more-or-less be Clint. Roughly.

"He should be around here," Tony insists, even if the hall doesn't look any different than any of the others. "I'm pretty sure we didn't go in a big circle. This doesn't look like the same T intersection we've passed before."

He couldn't have foreseen that EMP, but he can't get to his positioning system and losing his bead on Clint could mean they've lost both him _and_ Steve. He's _not_ panicking about it, and _not_ thinking about what it'll fucking to do Clint if they fail to ever show up. What he'll start telling himself in a week, or a month, or a year, even if he trusted them enough right then to volunteer for this like it was anything other than a stupid gamble. 

It had _almost_ worked out, sort of, but he can't think with his head a jumble of _took the eye_ and _what they could do to Steve forever_ and really sickeningly creative ideas of what they could want with Clint now that he wasn't a mostly undocumented minor anymore, and how that might intersect with what they could want with Steve.

He really _should_ implant everyone with GPS devices--himself included--for possible similar future situations. Which will hopefully be few and far between.

Over the comms, he can hear Natasha and Bruce sounding like they're clear of battle and maybe laying low, talking in low murmurs, but now that they've been discovered it's just a matter of time before the place is all-out swarmed and what's left of their plan goes to hell, and Clint should _be_ there. Should be right around where they're standing, if Tony's remembering the tracker feed right, and--

"Oh, hell. I'm a fucking idiot." Thor doesn't dignify that, or even respond other than to give him an expectant look, waiting. It makes Thor kind of a pal. Natasha would have had things to say and Bruce would have had ironic looks to make. "We have to--" He gestures, flipping a finger up and down, indicating the ceiling and then floor in turns, "move vertically."

"Down, then?" is Thor's suggestion, which is the better guess, but busting through the floor the way it looks like Thor's planning on maybe isn't the best option, even if they've blown stealth all to hell. First of all, it'll bring more security down on them faster, and god knew what shape Clint might be in, even if they haven't cut any more parts off. It's probably better _not_ to ensure they'll be extracting through a firefight.

\-----

It takes about four minutes and the hammering down of some security locked doors to find an elevator, now that they're looking for one, and there's something inane about riding it down with Thor, but at least it's not playing music at them.

They go down for what feels like several floors' worth even though there's only one lower level indicated, and then the elevator pings at them and comes to a somewhat jerky halt. Tony's starting to imagine the doors opening to a volley of gunfire, and a similar thought is probably popping into Thor's head, because he says, "Behind me," and doesn't give Tony much of a choice about it, shoving him back and taking up a position to cover as much of the doorway as possible.

But the place is still a lab, which means its usual population is geeks who have regular bedtimes, and the doors open onto a floor half-lit with safety lights and not much else. There's no resistance as they retrace their steps to the corresponding _should be around here_ point on this lower level. "Watch the entrance," he tells Thor, as they step--sideways and keeping their backs to the wall, to avoid making tidy silhouette targets of themselves--into a large room, as dark as the hall, the half-light dotted with computer stand-by lights and power strip switches. On the far end of the room, a monitor someone's left on is glowing faintly and playing a tropical fish screen saver.

Like it's any other damn office. 

At least, if they discount the long benches covered in familiar equipment. Or familiar to Tony anyway. Probably familiar to Bruce, if he was there. It looks like his workspace at the tower, but dialed up and multiplied for use by more than one awkward, slightly reckless scientist. There's whole tables filled with labeled test tubes, arranged in rows of tidy racks. Neon-sign blue glows from the glass paneled door of a laboratory fridge, and Tony can make out containers and liquid filled bags inside it--IV drugs, or maybe drawn blood. Maybe something else. It's impossible to tell. There's chemical scanners and a centrifuge and a short row of glove boxes for hazardous material work.

They probably have a bigger book of monsters than the one Bruce had commandeered. It's probably even more monstrous to boot, seeing as they've had some time to perfect their skills in disturbing creation manufacture. Considering how similar it is to the lab in the woods, right down to the skylight wells extending far upwards, there's probably some storage area around too, bigger and more updated than a closet with a staircase. Tony hopes they don't find it.

The double swing doors in this lab don't lead into an OR or another lab, but into a hallway, this one brightly lit and with caution notices up on the walls. And they're definitely getting warmer, because the reminders are about ensuring proper restraint and locking down the hall and _authorized entry only_. It leads to what look like a pair of extra wide fire doors, one at each end, heavy and with a little viewing window set in them. Lock release buttons set in panels in the wall nearby mean that they're not openable from inside. It has to be the hall Clint's blip had been traveling up and down. 

_Has_ to be.

One of the doors leads into what looks like a staging area, or the most bare bones, unfriendly medical waiting room Tony's ever seen, with bolted down chairs and a metal gurney shoved against one wall. More doors open off the area, but they're small and room numbered and look like dead ends. Like individual offices or examination rooms or--or whatever they were used for. The door at the other end of the hall is more promising. The view from the little window is onto a row of cells, painfully similar to the ones in the abandoned lab, right down to their large animal chutes for loading into crates or for getting into safe reach of whatever their kidnapees might shift into.

He can't help but wonder what the bear guy's deal is and if he knows about this. Because it's pretty twisted if he does and is still sticking around.

There's a distant shudder. Hopefully it's Bruce still playing with Clint's explosive arrows and not Bruce _getting_ exploded. Or losing his grip on the Hulk. Whatever it is, it's a sign to hurry, and Tony hits the door release button and is through before it even opens completely, leaving Thor to watch the lab and keep an eye open for potential goon arrivals.

Up close, the cells are just like their precursors that he and Bruce and Thor had poked around in, just housed off the lab instead of in it. He doesn't need to check any further to know this is it. There's not enough disturbance in the area he and Thro have come through for Clint to have been moved and the door to the cell that's probably his--judging by the information posted, the list of shifts--is shut and still locked tight. Tony takes a breath and taps his ear as he starts working out the lock. 

"Dorothy? I think we've found your little dog."


	24. Chapter 24

There's no response from Natasha, which doesn't do much to make Tony feel better about the way the floor is still shuddering--harder and for longer periods at a time now. He hopes it's not another, bigger, disabling pulse, because the suit may be gone, but the comms are all that's tying the team together at the moment, radio silence aside.

The door to the cell isn't too complicated. It's comfortingly mechanical rather than electronic, which means he can work the release without JARVIS access or assisting doohickeys since he's low on laser-powered cutting tools at the moment. Instead all he has to do is jimmy a series of bolts--a task that's no more complicated than pulling some pins before he can lift the catches and slide the thick, heavy duty dowels securing the door over. He can hear his heart pounding as he does it, out of fear of being wrong about having found Clint--both because it would mean they've lost him after all _and_ because he doesn't want to spring the wrong tiger. 

Be sprung on by the wrong tiger. 

He should probably have opened the chute instead, considering he's no longer safely ensconced in the armor, but the heavy main door is already swinging open--silent and smooth on well-oiled, well-maintained hinges. He probably shouldn't be impressed at the quality of the equipment, but this is clearly a high level facility, at least on the animal containment front if not on the goon front. Possibly on the science front, even though Tony doesn't want to give them any credit in that direction, considering what it is they're doing with their research. 

The inside of the cell is even darker than the half-lit lab, and the bright light that spills in as Tony lets the door swing open a little further makes a harsh rectangle on what looks like a concrete floor. The sudden flood of light is probably blinding, which is maybe why nothing jumps out of the darkness to literally bite his head off. Instead, there's the sound of sharp movement--scuffing and a hard jangle that comes to an abrupt halt. Heavy breathing.

"Hey," Tony calls, low-voiced, pushing the door a little wider, encouraged when no large mammal barrels through and over him, "It's the--cops," he finishes, when he realizes he doesn't look like any known Avenger at the moment. "We're gonna get you out of here. I'm just looking for--Clint?"

He hears Thor's pleased acknowledgement over the comms, but Bruce and Natasha are still incommunicado. 

He can't worry about them at the moment. Not when Clint looks up with close to zero recognition, eyes blank and panic-glazed. Not just blinded by the sudden light. Fuck fuck fuck. He'd better be okay, or Tony's going to level the damn place--suit or not--and let SHIELD handle anything he might set loose in the process.

Clint's dressed in flimsy clothing that reminds Tony of prisons and hospitals at the same time and wishes they'd remembered Clint's pantsless-Bruce issues, because any change of clothes they have is back on the jet and possibly Banner rather than Barton sized. As his eyes adjust to the darkness inside the cell, he can see that the reason there's been such a marked lack of pouncing is that Clint's attached to the floor by a pair of wide cuffs, a short chain running between them and a heavy loop embedded in the floor is the cause of the clanking sound. Clint jerking to the end of it the reason for the abrupt halt to the clatter.

"Clint." Tony has his hands up in a calming gesture, but he's aware that he's backlit and that maybe Clint can't make gestures out yet, after being shut in the dark for what had probably been hours. And that Clint's blank look might have very little to do with lack of visibility. Other than that first glance up, he's keeping his head down, shaking it in a way that kind of scarily reminds Tony of sick cows. Like his skull is too heavy and he's confused by the weight and his inability to balance it. "Hey."

He gets two steps into the cell before Clint jerks back again, hard enough that Tony can see the strain in his elbows and shoulders when he slams against the end of his slack. Tony can see bruises where his sleeves are rucked up, and he's not sure if that's a result of Clint trying to fight the short length of the tether, or trying to shift to something big and with a fighting chance. When he gets a little closer, he can catch the plastic shine of light from outside hitting something foggy white and narrow against Clint's throat. At his wrists.

Zip ties. Not even holding his wrist together, just threatening amputation--and decapitation--if he tries to shift to something larger. 

"Hang on. We're getting you out of here," Tony keeps talking, keeping his voice low and even as he edges closer, "so try not to snap my neck with that chain. This plan hasn't been going great as it is." He's definitely in a danger zone as he gets down to Clint's level, but Clint's kicking at the floor trying to get away instead of trying to maul him, and as much as Tony hates to, he shifts forward to pin the chain under his foot while he can. Before Clint's panic flips from flight to fight. He's _way_ more fucked up than that day at the tower, when he'd been dealing with discovery by paranoidly casting aspersions all around.

"They took your Avenger duds, huh?" Tony asks, "Don't worry about it. I lost mine too and mine were way spiffier that yours." He's close enough now to easily touch Clint, but he hesitates, letting his hand hover over Clint's shackled wrists long enough that even screwed-up, Clint had to have enough time to read Tony's intention. It's probably not going to help anything to further restrain Clint, but the only response when Tony finally drops his hand onto Clint's joined ones is that he jerks back again and shudders hard when he find his movements even more constrained. Loud huffing noises coming from him like he's trying to pant through his nose.

Tony says, "It's me. It's just Tony," and Clint finally lifts his head, and _goddamn_. 

He looks dazed and like he's about to climb out of his skin, but it's the blood at his mouth that makes Tony go hot then cold with anger. It's streaked down Clint's chin and across his cheek, drips of it dark against the fabric of his shirt, and now Tony can see that there's something jammed in his mouth, wedging it half-open and secured by wide straps. Clint fussing at it at least explains his weird head shaking. Working his jaw trying to dislodge it has probably torn his mouth to shit and he's making it worse trying to talk, emitting muffled distressed noises as he tries to get Tony to let his hands go.

"Easy," Tony tries, without much faith that it'll work. At least Clint seems to be stuck at _retreat_ , instead of moving on into slam-Tony's-head-off territory. "I don't have a knife, and I don't want to try to shoot anything off you, but I can probably--" He doesn't finish, because he's focused on making sure Clint's not going to smash him under the chin when he lets go of his hands--sliding his foot up the chain as he does, but still--so he can use both hands to feel along the gag's strap to the back of Clint's head. 

The damn thing is locked shut, but with some stubborn jerking--and accidental hair-pulling--he manages to pop it over the curve of Clint's skull and slide it forward until he has enough give to unhook the gag from behind Clint's teeth, muttering apologies when getting his fingers into Clint's mouth to work the thing free drags muffled protest out of him. 

Clint spits the second the thing is out, then spits again and wipes his mouth against his shoulder. 

"Hey there, foxy," Tony says, when Clint looks up again, blinking in what looks like confusion, and holds up the gag--a heavy, dull-ended spike that fit vertically like some kind of medieval torture device. "Anything else keeping you from being portable size?"

The chuffing sound Clint makes in response isn't a laugh. It's actually pretty reminiscent of the tiger, when it was unsure of a situation, scenting or questioning or something else tiger-speak that Tony can't interpret. It's entirely unclear if it's a sign of Clint finally recognizing him or not. 

Barton had better hurry up with that, because the low thudding is getting less low and more thudding, vibrating through the walls and floor, and whatever is coming _maybe_ wouldn't be a match for Thor, but that's not really a gamble Tony wants to take. He eases back off the chain, letting Clint have some movement back, keeping his hands up defensively until he's out of murdering range, then chucks the gag, sending it thumping into the farthest away wall. 

"Come on, Barton. Unless you want to me to chew through those zip ties, you better do your shrinky escape thing."

Clint swallows, then gags and spits again. At least his breathing isn't coming in hard puffs now that his mouth is free. Maybe the increased oxygen flow is helping bring his brain back online and Tony hopes so, because otherwise he's a bit out of ideas. 

There's yelling from outside, a little distant, but familiar enough. Thor's starting to meet some opposition and they're caught in a dead fucking end with only one of the three of them really worth his weight in resistance and on top of everything, the hard shudder is still continuing, more dramatic and reverberating through the walls in a way that's reminding Tony of California. In an uncomfortable, active fault lines kind of way.

"Clint--" Tony starts, a little anxiously, trying to hurry him along. 

Something smashes outside, and Thor shouts a curse, and a second later there's a burst of something across the comms, sounding comfortingly--to an extent, at least--like Natasha's voice, even if it's just an urgent garble. "Widow," Tony yells back, "We have Hawkeye. The bird is in the hand. Repeat, the bird--"

Before he can finish, there's another shudder, clearer now--something's smashing around above, like someone's bouncing a fucking demolition ball all over the upper officey level. The vibration is hard enough that something out in the lab rattles then crashes. Tony hopes it's that fucking tropical fish monitor. 

Thor bellows something, sounding like an angry bull, and there's more crashing, another rumble, and then people yelling. He can make out a _get back_ and a _drop your weapon_ and someone cursing, and then there's a sound like thunder--rolling instead of a sharp clap--and the sound of something cascading heavily out where Thor is.

He only looks away for a second, but it's enough for Clint to make his move, fleeing in a compact streak of gray and copper into the shadows of the cell, skirting around Tony in the darkness by the walls, and darting through the door the second he's clear.

"So it _was_ only the spike, then?" Tony calls after him, but without enough volume to carry. 

\-----

Clint doesn't make it far. Tony had fixed the safety door to keep from locking himself in in the likely case of Thor being too occupied to play doorman, but he finds Clint scrabbling like a maniac at the base of the outer hall door like he's trying to dig his way out under it. It's the most animal Tony's ever seen him, and a shift aspect he hadn't considered. 

Or really, that Clint might have intentionally glossed over. 

"Function following form, Barton?" Tony asks, crouching by him, hands full of the bundle of Clint's prison clothes. His being the stupid fox actually makes Clint's desperation kind of funny, in a dark sort of way and horrible situation aside. His feet are making rapid squealing, scritching noises against the floor, his ears laid flat to his skull like they're being blown back in a high wind. "Calm down. You're okay."

Clint's digging slows. He hasn't made any headway on the hard floor--obviously--but he's possibly worn his ridiculous bitty claws down uncomfortably far, because the last few scratches seem a little tentative. Tony would pick the pathetic thing up, but he's pretty sure that would be a great way to lose a finger, so he stays still and quiet while Thor holds off the advancing hordes with what sounds like decreasing success and team Black Widow stays mysteriously and frighteningly silent.

"Clint," he tries, when Clint's stopped his excavating entirely and just sits there panting, ears drooped, shoulders hunched. Even his tail is still and flat against the floor. "We really need to find Steve. Fast. We have one shot." If their window's not closed already. At least unlike Clint, Steve has a super soldier fighting chance at slowing down any attempts at removal and relocation. "Please."

He doesn't really mean that _please_. He's about two seconds from dumping Clint's clothes over him to prevent fox bites and scooping him up that way. The only thing stopping him is that Clint might shift into an equally panic blind jungle cat and hospital-weight cotton might not do much to hold that version of him at bay. Even folded up into layers.

"And that door's not even locked. You just need hands. Shift back."

It takes a few more seconds, and then Clint's himself, still sitting regarding the door, hair sweat-dark and stuck to his head, chest heaving in canine-ish pants, but that last might be more a result of his torn-up mouth. Tony really wishes they had some water for him so he could at least wash the taste of blood out of it. There's probably something they can raid somewhere. There might be a water cooler or something around, but they'll have to get out of here to find it. 

"You okay? You want to get dressed?"

Clint scrubs the heel of one hand against his face and into his eyes, then takes a long, shuddering breath--it sounds almost like it gurgles on the exhale, which is a bit scary until Clint glances over at him without otherwise moving and rasps, "Where's your tin can?" then clears his throat and spits again.

"Long story, Goldilocks," Tony tells him, and drapes the shirt over his shoulders before dropping the bundled pants into his hands, "Get decent and let's find your abduction buddy."

Clint doesn't respond, but he's working his arms into the shirt's sleeves with toddler levels of proficiency, clumsy and halting. Fumbling with the buttons. Tony had been hoping to pass the gun off to him, but he's not sure Clint's trustable with a firearm at the moment and that's a fucking shame because Thor sounds like he could use the back-up and Tony's shooting is functional, but their limited ammunition means they need to make every bullet count. 

And that's a Hawkeye job if there ever was one.

"Get it together. We have a slight trapped and under attack problem happening. I didn't want to say anything before." While Clint was having his hysterics. "Also," Tony goes on, with a jerk of his head back the way they'd come, "How do you feel about busting out your neighbors?"

Clint looks down the hall, then back at the door and starts to haul himself up and Tony notices for the first time that he's bare foot. That his incarceration ensemble doesn't include shoes or even slippers. They're so well equipped for a fight, it's unbelievable. "Safer where they are," Clint decides, enunciating carefully and wincing as he talks, "We could get them killed." He stops to swallow and then adds, "They'd be in the way," reluctantly, and Tony realizes that he thinks _get them killed_ might be a greater favor than leaving them to survive a failed--whatever this was. Rescue mission turned liberation mission, maybe. It's not like they can leave the rest of the captives behind.

"Okay. Stay here. Get your bearings. I'm going to go help Thor, and you do--whatever you think you're good for."

Clint actually manages to look offended, but he nods once, short, getting some focus back, and Tony grins at him and thumps him once on the back. "I know I said no labs, Clint," he starts.

"You got me out," Clint shrugs, "That's close enough. Let's get Cap."

"Okay. When you're ready," Tony says, and ducks back out into the lab to go help Thor.

\-----

Thor looks like he's engaged in some kind of hyperactive game of whack-a-mole, and Tony shooting into the fray isn't much of a help, even though he's kind of in the zone, psyched by their successful Clint-retrieval and hitting what he aims for at a rate that would put Rhodey--at least--to shame.

If he had the suit, he'd be recording this for proof purposes.

Even if their survival is in dubious territory, with the unrelenting goon flow and whatever the hell is thudding around the place getting more enthusiastic upstairs. "Widow," Tony yells, hoping she can hear him even if he can't hear _her_ , "Be available for backup." He's not expecting an answer, but he has to try. "Bruce?"

" _Fight_ , Tony," Thor snaps, and his short temper is a clear sign that he's getting swamped.

"What do you want me to do? Throw my gun at them?" He's not down to that yet, but it's getting close. As it is, he's having to tactically choose his targets. Picking off anyone who seems like they're getting past Thor or who just looks too clever and-or schemey for their own good. 

Clint makes his entrance too soon for Tony's liking, but it's not like any of them would willingly hang back while the others face down lousy odds. "I'd appreciate if you don't backseat shoot," Tony tells him, sheltering behind a desk to reload.

"Try to get at least two per bullet," Clint suggests unhelpfully and Tony can't tell if he's serious or back to being a shit.

"Thor. Bit of firepower," Tony yells, "I'm not sharing guns with Barton." Thor's response is a grunt. He's probably too pre-occupied to be redistributing dropped firearms. "Maybe I can run over," Tony suggests, handing the gun off. 

Clint's hands get steady the second he's aiming at something, the last of the wobble falling away to be replaced by professional cool. "Try to get at least two per bullet," Tony tells him, slouching low and peering around the desk to see if he can find anything useful that's also reachable without getting his head blown off.

Clint fires and says, "Three," then fires again. "Two. Two. One." That last is a wry admission. Like just hitting isn't good enough for the lousy show-off. There's range time in Tony's future if they make it out of here.

And that's a pretty big if. Thor is losing to the insistent press. It's only a matter of time until they break through. Or at least, enough of them to put a bullet in his and Clint's heads. 

Which is a pretty good incentive to risk a bullet _now_. Tony's gearing up to make a dash for a dropped gun when the goons back off, retreating up the far hall, leaving Thor out beyond the lab door, breathing hard and bristling, hammer spinning at his side. Tony's about to head out to scavenge some more firepower, when a low rumble starts somewhere above, threateningly low. Coming through the walls now. The goons aren't retreating. They're heading off to deal with a bigger threat--a bigger, greener threat, Tony's pretty sure--which means the three of _them_ are about to be locked-in, or--

There's no bang. Just a rush of hot wind and a roar, and then Thor is blown back in a spray of rubble as abrasive grit shoots through the air and just about takes the skin off the hand he has sticking out around the end of the desk.

The lab settles into silence and clouds of dust. Next to him, Clint's getting up to lean over the desk, eyes fixed on the pile of what was once part of the floors' worth of ceiling above them and whispers, "Get up." The pile is Thor. Or really, that the pile is _on top of_ Thor, and Tony echoes Clint's sentiment in his head, desperately thinking, _get up get up get up_ , and _fuck, I can't explain this to Steve_ , but a few seconds later there's a cough and the sound of pebbles shifting and rolling, and then Thor sits up with a groan that's more annoyed than hurt, displacing chunks of rock and drywall and brick.

" _That_ is why I prefer being bulletproof," Tony comments, looking around to survey the damage. There's bits of rubble blown into the lab, a layer of rough sand and dust coating everything and crunching under his feet as he heads over to help dig Thor out.

"Is everybody well?" is Thor's first concern when he starts to recover, shaking bits of rubble out of his hair and brushing himself off. He's pressing a hand against the side of his head in a way that probably means his ears are ringing. It's a weirdly human problem for a guy who's just let himself be shot at to cover Tony and Clint. Tony grins at him.

"Yeah. We're good." He nods at the blocked-off hall, "They walled us in, huh?" They'd broken in through a lock-down, so whatever genius was in charge of security had probably figured they'd be equally likely to break _out_ through one. It's a fair conclusion, even if Tony thinks bringing down the place is erring on the side of overkill.

"Clint?" Thor presses, "And Steve?"

"Here." Clint's voice is still a rasp as he comes picking his way over, hobbling a little over the debris until he realizes that taking the risk of getting his feet cut up is stupid and unnecessary and limps to a halt. "Sorry I don't have Steve with me, but," he has to stop to work his mouth and cough then finishes scratchily, "I know where he is."

"Oh? They take you for a meet and greet?" Tony asks, hauling on Thor's arm. It's probably not really doing anything to help him up, but he had to do _something_. Clint scratches at his hair self-consciously.

"No."

"New found psychic ability?"

" _No_." Clint looks irritated now. It's a huge improvement on _freaking the hell out_. "Fox shift. I could smell him. I was--" he nods at the ceiling like that means something, but when neither Tony nor Thor jump in to proclaim comprehension he shrugs one shoulder, then looks away to check his ammunition. It's a pathetic cover. "Being processed," he finishes, without looking up. "Ground level somewhere. I could smell grass. And dirt and stuff."

"And Steve."

Clint nods. "And Steve."

Confirmation that Steve is on the grounds is a relief, but only sort of, because they're still trapped and Bruce is probably rampaging, and Natasha is still a no-go on the comms. Tony really, really hopes she's not a Hulk-flung mash on a wall somewhere. 

"We have to get out of here." It's a pretty pointless statement, but neither Clint nor Thor comments on it. "Where's your hammer?" 

Thor looks at the heap of rubble, and great. Buried. Tony's got no doubt that Mjolnir is trying to return already, like the world's most loyal dog, but it's going to take it some time to wiggle it's way through the cave-in. Tony digs a little, half-heartedly tossing chunks of rubble aside, but there's no telling how far in the pile goes. "That thing can't detour, huh?" he asks Thor, wiping his dusty hands off on his shirt. The association of evil scientists probably has some kind of backhoe alien to excavate the mess later. Maybe some kind of giant armadillo creature.

There's probably one jar thing-ed together somewhere in the place. Tony wouldn't be surprised. Horrified, but not surprised.

Clint's picking along the perimeter of the lab with cool Hawkeye detachment, absently rifling through papers and desk clutter as he goes. Popping a stapler, poking a corner of one of the glove boxes like he's testing the seal, hooking fingers in the handle of the fridge like he's going to open it, scanning walls and ceiling tiles as he goes, then coming to a halt, head craned back. "Hey."

"Hey is for horse monsters," Tony says, "Want me to find you some?" 

Clint gives him a look, and Tony realizes that he's not caught up. That he doesn't know about Space Collection. Tony doesn't explain, and Clint doesn't seem interested in pursuing the comment, pointing up at the distant skylight. It's small and probably reinforced glass. Even if he had the suit, he'd have to smash out the rim to make the opening wide enough to fit through. As it is, without the suit to increase his bulk, he might be able to wiggle his way out, but it's too high up for the attempt. The ceiling well the window is set at the top of is a good two stories high, at least, and that's not counting the distance from the start of the well to the floor.

"Maybe Thor can jump it," Tony suggests, and gets a dirty look that he takes as a _no_. "You didn't see a ladder around, did you, Barton?"

Clint wipes the back of a hand over his mouth, adding streaks of dust to the blood on his face. He looks disgusting. "If Thor can break it," he croaks, "I can try to--" The way he stops in the middle of that sentence is a pretty clear indicator that he's not as steady as he's putting on. He keeps considering the skylight for long seconds, before looking over at them like he's searching their faces for some kind of tell, then looks away again and finishes, "I can try to fly up."

It takes Tony a few minutes to catch up. It's not that he's forgotten about Clint's close-guarded inner bird, he just hadn't considered it as being any kind of option, ever. Clint's reaction to Steve just asking about it had pretty much shoved it right off any kind of possibility list and clear into no-go territory. And then there's the other tiny little minor complication.

"I thought you couldn't fly?"

Clint shoots him a look that's either annoyed or offended. "I didn't say I couldn't. I said it was _hard_." Then he steps away from under the skylight and adds, "I had to learn, a bit," in a casual tone. If Tony didn't know how secretive and twitchy he was about that last shift, if they hadn't gone through weeks of no mention of it, no matter how hyper and ridiculous Clint got about being everything else, he'd never guess how much was loaded into that comment.

"Watch your feet," he says, instead of responding to it, feeling the effect of adrenaline crash and of being on the high-tension go for what's coming up on _way too fucking long_. Thor's already looking for promising projectiles, but Tony's mortal bones need a goddamn nap. And food. And then another nap. There's no light coming through from the other side of that square of glass, but Tony guesses they're coming up on morning. He's managed to smash the screen on Bruce's phone somehow and there's no readout other than a Rorschach of blown pixels, but it's got to be either the end of the night, or else it's the longest night he's ever lived through.

Which means they have to move. Clint's going to have a better chance if he has the cover of darkness. 

At least with the wall of rubble, they don't have a shortage of things to throw. The first few chunks that Thor heaves up bounce back at them, but eventually one hits at on a good angle and causes small fracture lines to appear in the skylight. The next brings a shower of glass raining down and Clint at least has the sense to keep his shoe-less self out of the way as Thor tries to knock down some of the remaining shards to make the edge as non-Barton shredding as possible.

"I'm going to need a comm for Steve," Clint says, "You can tie it to my foot after I shift."

It's like Clint's on a mission to traumatize himself, but Tony takes the strip of fabric Clint tears off the bottom of his shirt and Thor's earpiece and ties the two so that the device is a safe little snag-proof bundle. "We're not this under equipped," he tells Clint, holding it up for inspection, "It's just that your stuff and the extra comms are with Bruce and 'Tasha."

Clint nods and doesn't ask after them. Just sheds his shirt and stays sitting on the end of one of the long tables, next to a shot-out computer monitor. He looks like he could use something to drink, but rummaging around the desks comes up with nothing. The place seems to keep tighter lab discipline than Tony's ever bothered to. There's probably water back in the unfriendly vet's office, but Tony's not sure what they'll find back there and doesn't want to risk it. Not while they're trapped and with two of them only about half functional. At least, _he's_ half functional. Clint's probably only coming in at the one-third mark, and that's by generous estimation. Now that his arms are bare and human, Tony can see the mottled bruising and prick marks of multiple needle jabs at the insides of his elbows.

He'd ask about it, but it wouldn't make a difference. They still need Clint to do his Wright Brothers thing.

"Ready?" 

Clint doesn't look it, but he takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly and then there's a big bird standing at the end of the table, kicking its way free of the tangled fabric of Clint's pants. It's dark feathered in deep browns, with a spatter of white over its chest and marking the ends of its wing feathers. The undersides of its wings--when Clint flaps experimentally--are pale, a stark, contrasting white that's going to reflect back if Clint's stupid enough to fly too close over a light.

"You're right," Tony tells him, when Clint finishes stretching and beating his wings, "that is either a big hawk or a small eagle."


	25. Chapter 25

No matter what he might claim, Clint _can't_ fly, or at least not very well. His first attempt is pathetic, all ineffective, graceless flapping, creating more wind than lift and sending enough dust swirling back into the air that Tony has to pull the collar of his shirt up over his face to keep from breathing in mouthfuls of it.

"I don't know if I can watch this," Tony tells Thor, voice muffled behind hand and shirt as Clint scrabbles at the lower edge of the well, like he's going to try to climb up it instead of fly, wings beating frantically before he flaps back to the floor to regroup. They've cleared as much of the glass as they could from the landing zone, but it's probably still not a good idea for Clint to hop around the floor in what looks very much like a snit fit, wings threateningly upraised. "I've seen roosters with better take offs."

Thor gives him a reproachful look, but gets Clint up on his arm and away from the remaining glass shards, smoothing his feathers with his free hand. He looks like a guy used to handling raptors and being perched on by them. In fact, he looks a lot more comfortable with the situation than Clint does, nervously walking his way up Thor's arm and across his shoulders in a way that would probably be a bad idea to allow a real hawk-eagle-thing to do, and carefully tests each wing, one at a time. Peering at them with what's could be a perplexed look, but could also be peeve--the bird's permanent fierce look is hard to read.

"Don't blame the hardware, Barton," Tony says, "We all know it's the execution that's lacking," then grins when Thor unconsciously reaches to stop all the wing fluttering next to his head.

"Perhaps a launch?" he suggests, holding his fist near his shoulder for Clint to step onto. He doesn't do that with much expertise either, holding his wings out for balance as he makes the transition and struggling for purchase on Thor's gauntlet even if his earthly bird claws aren't likely to so much as ding Thor's Asgardian--if bare and unprotected--hands.

"You want to _throw him_?" Tony objects, "He flies like a drunk duckling." What they really need is a long stick they can use to just raise Clint towards the window. 

Or maybe a ladder.

Thor isn't fazed, calmly adjusting Clint's grip--Clint clings like his feet are Velcro and flaps in protest. His birdly balance isn't the most impressive thing Tony's ever seen--then tries a couple of test-heaves, free hand keeping Clint in place since they don't have jesses to keep him from premature take-off and Clint probably wouldn't tolerate them if they did. Probably wouldn't tolerate Thor using the strip of fabric as a replacement, even if Tony hadn't torn the loose ends off short and close to the knot. 

Clint's wings open reflexively on the down-swing, the action getting a little smoother as he settles into the shift, catching enough air now that he's actually pulling on Thor's grip, lifting away a little as he works out how his wings _actually_ work. Thor's looks like he's forgotten that he's dealing with Clint and not some regular bird, because he's making soft soothing noises and talking in Asgardian, low and musical until Clint's flapping starts to look easier and more natural. And less like a kid with his first two-wheeler.

"Ready?" Thor asks, moving one hand from Clint's feet to his back, getting a good throwing grip.

Clint's response is to make a soft whistling noise--Tony's not sure what sound he'd expected out of the bird, but it's not that--and to drop his weight in preparation for leaping upward, wings held away from his body a little, ready to unfurl. 

The launch isn't so much Thor hurtling Clint through the window like a football the way Tony had kind of been picturing as it is an expert boost, smooth and practiced, at least on Thor's part. On Clint's part it's a powerful leap, but followed by dramatic, embarrassing wing thrashing, but at least he's thrashing his way upwards this time, actually gaining altitude even if each inch gained looks like a painful struggle. 

He's nearly to the top when Tony realizes that they've made a serious miscalculation. 

"Oh hell," he says, without heat. The law of whatever-can-go-wrong is in full swing. He's not even surprised anymore at the way the fuck ups are piling up. "The window," he explains, when Thor gives him a questioning look. "It's too small for his damn wingspan." 

It is. The ceiling well is wide enough, but the window itself would be a tight fit for a grown man, let alone fifty-something inches across of barely coordinated flailing. If Clint was better at aerobatics, he'd probably be fine but since he's not exactly the Red Baron--not by a long shot--he ends up trying to grab for the edge with his feet, twisting his body around and tipping like a boat taking on water.

He realizes he's managing to actually _fall off the air_ too late to recover and ends up clawing for purchase, making horrible nails-on-chalkboard sounds when he manages to get close enough to the walls to make contact, scraping as he tries to find something to catch onto. There's nothing, the walls are flat and smooth, and when Clint realizes, he goes into a panic, wings beating wildly, pounding against the walls as often as not as he fights to stay airborne. 

Or at least, fights to not drop like a rock for the equivalent of close to four stories. 

With his bow and the right arrow, Clint would probably know what to do, but he has no reflexes as the bird--none that are worth a damn, anyway--so his flight turns into something more like that of a bug in a jar than a hawk _or_ an eagle, bouncing off the sides of the well and catching just enough air to turn his plummet into what Tony might describe as a _somewhat hasty descent_ if he was talking about a suit test.

Clint falls free off the well with a final screech of claws against wall, and a furious--or terrified--hawk scream. A harsh _keee-ah_ that cuts off as he thumps into Thor's catch. Thor's halfway into saying something--probably along the lines of _gotcha_ \--when Clint catches enough breath to start hissing at him, claws tearing at his chest plate and even face, wings pumping furiously to propel the attack.

 _Now_ he's coordinated, Tony doesn't comment, mostly because he's busy grabbing Clint's discarded clothes and dodging around Thor until he's in a position to throw them over the bird, hoping to restrain Clint's wings long enough that Thor won't have to swat him away to get him off.

It's a bad decision. 

Clint falls away, but keeps up his attack, thrown back into senseless panic now that he's half-tangled in fabric and can't see. He's a bundle of hissing, screaming, struggling bird, getting his feet under himself long enough to hop a few times before the cloth snagging on a talon makes him trip and tumble and then he starts the whole cycle over again.

He's too tangled to go for the eyes, or anything else, and Tony's half grabbing for him to keep him from smashing into desks or chairs or the wall, when Clint spasms unnaturally in a weird undulation of skin and muscle--thankfully obscured by the tangle of fabric--then settles for a clear second before going utterly berserk. He's going to have a fucking heart attack if he doesn't calm the hell down and if Tony had a bucket of water, he'd try dumping that over him just on the off-chance that hawk soothing is anything like breaking up a dog fight.

"Fuck, Thor--" He doesn't know what to tell Thor to do. Catching Clint might just send him over the edge--if there's any edge Clint hasn't already tipped over--but _not_ catching Clint and letting him hiss and make frightening barky _kaaa_ noises and throw himself around isn't helping anything either. He's going to break a wing or a foot or strangle himself and Tony can hear him getting short of breath, but even that's not slowing him down. If they manage to find Steve, they're going to have to explain how they let Clint give himself an aneurysm. Tony's pretty sure that's where this is going, because Clint's freak-out just keeps ramping up and--

He grabs Clint almost on reflex, the second he realizes what the fucking problem is. Clint's big enough that Tony can't hold him, but Thor realizes that he's got an idea what's going on now and takes over, holding Clint's wings against his sides--they're damn bludgeoning instruments, is what they are--saying, "Hurry, Tony. Whatever you--"

Tony rips the comm off Clint's foot, using his teeth to start a tear in the fabric even though one kick from Clint could tear his face clean open, then whisks the rest of the cloth away, getting Clint clear of constriction as Thor releases him carefully back onto the floor. 

Where Clint stands panting, wings drooped, beak open and head low until he suddenly realizes he's free and rushes Thor, wings up and making pissed-off hissing noises until Thor's forced to catch him again in case he decides to rip after Tony--trying to distract him with the torn clothes doesn't do anything except make Tony feel like a ridiculous bird-fighting matador--then drops him again when Clint screeches like he think he's about to be murdered. 

And then Clint's a fox, a lion, a fox, the bird, the tiger, flipping through in the same desperate panic, out of control, before he's himself again, hunched with his back to the wall and his head tucked against his arms, knees up. He's heaving for breath, but he looks like the fit of rage-panic-rage has passed and he doesn't move when Thor drops to sit beside him, tucking his cape around Clint--maybe for want of a dog park jacket to shove him into--and carefully putting an arm around him.

"It's safe to change now," Thor tells him, kind of needlessly, but Clint nods without lifting his head and lets Thor carefully pat his back, in a similar way to how he'd straightened the bird's ruffled feathers.

"Sorry," Clint rasps, when they've been silent for what feels like a long time. His voice is even more gone than it had been, with all the screeching and hissing. He scrubs at his face. Tony tries not to notice the way his eyes are red-rimmed. "I'll try again in a minute."

That sounds like a _great_ idea. 

"No."

Clint doesn't argue, but he's got that Hawkeye-stubborn look that means he's going to do what he damn well wants anyway. "This time try a slip knot," he says, as if Tony hadn't _just_ objected, "Just in case."

"Barton--"

"Or we can dig for Thor's hammer."

"That's an option," Tony points out, even if it really isn't. They have no idea how far under Mjolnir might be. For all they know, it's clear on the other side of the obstruction, and the shuddering from elsewhere in the lab is still ongoing. "Your furry little feet are good at digging."

"I just need a minute," Clint insists, then tells Thor, "And this time throw a little harder."

\-----

 _Throw a little harder_ , is more or less what Tony expects a Clint plan to look like, so he's not sure why they're going along with it, but he tears another strip off the remains of the shirt--Clint's bird claws have torn it shreds. It's probably a good thing none of them are fazed by his post-shift nudity anymore--and re-ties the comm, fashioning a sliding knot and testing it on Clint's wrist to prove its resizeability to him, in case seeing it work--perfectly--will prevent him from losing his damn mind if he needs to shift with it on.

"You're lucky I have sailing experience," Tony says, even though hiring a yatch for parties might not count as actual sailing, and slides the knot loose then tight again before pulling it off Clint entirely, "Want to see my anchor hitch?"

Clint doesn't take him up on it, but he does give the new knot the OK. Or at least, he gives Tony a quick nod and starts to shake Thor's cape off. His arms are a mess of bruises and still-pink future-bruises from having beat against the walls, and that carry-over damage reminds Tony of the lion's missing eye and its surgery scars and _fuck_. He can't blame Clint for being on the brink. 

"One more try," he tells Clint, "And then it's onto plan hammer time."

"One more," Clint agrees, without any hint that he's agreeing to abort if it fails again. 

"Try to turn like this," Tony tells him, indicating the angle with a hand, "If you can keep your wings level and do it on the down beat, you can probably reach the edge."

Clint gives him a pretty good stink eye for the coaching and back-seat piloting. "I think I've got it, Tony." 

"Coulda fooled me. If you screw it up, Thor will catch you. Don't go nuts." He doesn't mention the _again_. This is supposed to be a pep talk. "Okay?"

He gets a thumbs-up instead of an answer, which could be Clint's mouth damage making talking uncomfortable again or Clint not trusting himself to be able to say _yes_ and sound honest. "Alright then," Tony says, "Let's go." 

\-----

Clint doesn't make it out the window on the first take of _throw harder_ , but he does fail less spectacularly, waiting till he's at the end of his Thor-powered ascent before he opens his wings instead of slowing himself down by flapping from the get-go. His twist to reach the edge misses, but it's close, and he manages to flap himself right-side-up and flutter his way back down into Thor's grasp. 

"Once more?" Thor asks, looking almost as thrilled to have a maybe-eagle settling back to his arm as Natasha had been to have a giant cat to take naps with, grinning when Clint whistles at him like a big undignified parakeet, pacing up his arm, then fluttering a little as he hops from Thor's shoulder back to his wrist, and makes an impatient bobbing movement.

It makes Thor grin. Thor and the bird are even more ridiculous than Thor and the dog act or Thor and the tiger wrestling, or Clint in general. Tony says, "Are we doing this or not? Because I also know how to build a shovel."

Clint _keee_ -s again, not panicked this time, just getting Thor's attention, and a second later his wings are beating the air, with less strength--he's clearly tiring--but more control. If Clint really _could_ fly, the rust's falling away. If he was lying, then Barton's an impressively quick study. 

This time he manages to get a grip on the lip of the opening, hanging on with one claw, and for a few seconds he's almost upside down, grabbing at air with the other foot. Thor's positioning himself for a catch when Clint beats his wings hard--smooth instead of his urgent turkey flapping--and manages to propel himself upwards and through the open square of the broken window--Not gracefully. It's really more of a sideways twist where he wedges himself half-through and uses an open wing to keep from falling back. Then it's a matter of kicking like a maniac, flapping his free wing and wiggling like a beached penguin, and then his center of balance tips enough that he flops onto the outer side of the skylight rather than falling back through to the lab floor. He's probably at least a little cut up from the remaining jags of glass, but it's a success.

An undignified, graceless success, but still.

"Nice work, Bird Man" Tony tells Thor, turning away from the window as the ground trembles under them again, "Should we get you a coop full of pigeons when we get back to the tower? Or maybe just a little singing colorful thing? Canary? Budgie? Small parrot? You can fly it off your finger and feed it peanuts from your plate."

Thor rolls a shoulder in an indifferent shrug. "Hawking is an honored sport among princes," he says, by way of explanation or like he thinks his expertise is being mocked, "Tony."

"Yeah? I'm pretty sure that's horse racing. Or camel racing, in some parts."

\-----

Clint-flight success or no, he and Thor are still stuck in the lab, and there's not much to do but start trying to retrieve Mjolnir and listen to the sounds coming over the comms.

Clint doesn't keep the bird shift once he's through. Tony can tell because he transmits shuffling noises and then, after a few moments, rapid panting. Tony's going to have to invent some kind of shift-friendly animal comm and maybe develop some kind of fox-bark based communications system. Bark once for _yes_ , two for _no_ , yap wildly for _oh hell everything is going to shit_.

There's a low crackle in his ear. He's not sure if that's Clint breathing into the comm as he races away across the lawn or maybe hides in the picturesque flower beds, or just static. Or, possibly, the earpieces took damage in the suit-eating pulse after all. He hopes they'll hold out long enough to get word to Steve or at least to get word _of_ Steve. Maybe to get information out of Clint that isn't the animal _huh huh huh_ he's been listening to for the last fifteen minutes.

Thor's shoveling chunks of rock and ceiling with his bare hands, tossing them with an ease that's not all that safe to be in the vicinity of. He's like a big gopher or something, making impressive headway despite the weight of some of the blocks of rubble, indifferent to the miniature landslides the impacts from above are making, shaking loose small pieces until he's ankle-deep in sand and pebbles. 

"At least we won't suffocate," Tony says, almost scrubbing a dusty hand over his eyes before thinking better of it and using the inside of his shirt instead. He has sand in his damn _beard_. 

There's another crackle and an "'Nny?" too broken up into electronic blorps to tell whose voice it is. He leaves Thor to stand under the skylight in case it's Steve or Clint and the floors of stone are blocking the anemic signal from coming through. 

"Come in. Steve? Cap?"

He gets a crackle, then an annoyed growl. Clint's big ears can hear him then, even if he's carrying the comm in his mouth. That's a good sign. 

"Bark once for yes," Tony says, raising his voice a little to I'm-on-speaker-phone pitch.

"'at?"

"Hello? Come in. Come in. Testing."

They have their wires crossed somewhere. If Clint is still sneaking his furry way across the compound, the half words have to be Bruce or Natasha. It's a damn relief to have them back. Or one of them back. Their future plans should really involve more sticking together and maybe, if at all possible, be triggered by less abduction.

Involve less underground.

And less not-by-them explosions.

"Clint?" Thor asks, taking a break from his hard labor to shake himself. He probably has rocks in his armor. There's clouds of dust billowing around him, drifting across the lab and pilling up in tiny little dunes.

"Nat. Maybe Bruce. Barton's okay."

There's a snap, then a long crackle and Clint barks distantly just as Natasha asks, voice clear, "Barton's okay?"

 _Fuck_. "Long time no speak, Widow. How've you been?" Natasha puffs. It's not a laugh. " _Where_ 've you been? Bruce having a waltz?" 

"Something like that." She sounds distracted. "Tony--"

"Where are you? And how is your Hulk steering?"

"Bad," Natasha says. "Tony. We found a--found some storage."

A real rage change then, and not an intentional, controlled one. Tony looks back in the direction of the cells and takes a breath. Lets it out. He doesn't need to ask what _storage_ had involved to know that he doesn't _want_ to know. "And here I thought Bruce was into freaky science."

"He--" Natasha takes a breath, then goes silent for long moments like she's laying low and continues in a much lower volume, "We thought it was Clint."

"It wasn't. He's fine." For certain more much more recent values of 'fine'.

The sound that comes from Natasha is broken by another crackle, and Tony's glad for it because he doesn't think he could take it if he had to listen to the Black Widow make relieved, broken-heart sounds. He doesn't want to know what she and Bruce found. Doesn't want to know what she'd been thinking during their radio silence.

"There was a room," she says, voice just about composed again, like the previous noise--whatever it had been--had never wrung its way out of her throat.

"Please don't tell me about the room."

"This place," she goes on, sounding cold, "They have _kids_ here, Tony."

They had known that was more than a possibility. Tony has flashes of Clint's single lion eye and cut-notched ears and the math test results that had come to an abrupt end, effectively dating his move from valued pet to lab inmate. "Don't tell me about the room," he says again.

The comm crackles. A softer sound than the electronic garble and popping. Just a dry whisper that starts and stops. For a second he thinks it's Widow sneaking, but then he realizes that Clint's harsh panting has been gone for a while, turned nearly inaudible except for a low hiss on the exhale.

"Tony--?"

" _Shh_." It's aimed at both Natasha's talking and Thor's rock rattling. He can hear something beyond the dry crackle of what might be leaves and the rustling noises of the comm brushing against something. It's obscured by a series of huffs--Clint sniffing for Steve, probably, which is just weird--and then, suddenly, he hears a canine whine and the light sound of fox nails on a hard surface, familiar from Clint's house pet act. He can't tell if Clint's running because he's just in a hurry or because he's being chased--the sound he'd heard is human feet. He can just imagine a group of lab guards and personnel racing after the fox and almost laughs before he remembers the bear and that they might have something faster than Clint.

And bigger. Bigger is probably not that tall an order. He's _maybe_ hors d'oeuvre size to a bear--if that bear is smallish and not terribly hungry--and probably not even a mouthful to a big cat if he gets caught still in sneak-about size.

"You hear that? Is that a scurrying noise?" Thor's still digging, with more haste, like the side of the conversation he can hear is fueling him, but it's making it hard to hear and follow Clint's progress. 

There's no reply from Natasha except for what is _definitely_ a scurrying noise. "Widow?"

Silence from her _and_ Clint. Tony pokes the comm impatiently and even Thor slows to a halt, looking between him and the skylight well like that's a viable exit for them or like he can _make it_ one.

"No throwing," Tony tells him, "I fly in the suit only. And airplanes. I have very specific criteria about how I travel."

"We must--" Thor starts, but then there's a hard thump and the sound of something scattering above, a curse from Natasha, a mess of shouting and heavy boots and something snarling, and then a volley of pops--gunfire--and a low _ffgh_. That last is the only thing Tony can identify the source of--it's a foxish grunt of effort--but the rest could be from either end of the communication. 

"Which one of you is under fire?" 

Thor heaves armfuls of rubble, but he's finally getting somewhere, because the heap of rock is vibrating independently of the accelerating thuds of impact, sending sand and pebbles cascading down the sides of the pile-up, the rounder, heavier pieces rolling and clattering against the walls and floor.

"Barton. Bark once for 'my life is in peril'."

Clint doesn't. Natasha swears. Something explodes out of the wall of rubble, and into Thor's hand, spraying dust and bits of stone all over the place _again_ , and the sound of straining metal squeals over the comms at the same time that something else jingles--Tony can't even start to interpret that one, but he thinks it's probably Clint. Jingling's been his thing, generally speaking--Above them, something thumps hard enough to make the lights in the lab waver, and Thor lifts his hammer, but before he can do anything with it, there's a rumble and a sound like water rushing and the cave-in is scattered in all directions, giving Tony just enough time to snatch the gun back up and dive for cover. 

And then Steve's voice sounds in his ear, low and dangerous and almost as rough as Clint's had been, saying, un-Steve-like, "--and don't think I won't break every leg you have."


	26. Chapter 26

Of _course_ the Hulk would be attracted to destruction and explosions. They've practically conditioned him to it by taking him out on Avengers field trips where they demolish parking garages, tear fire escapes off of apartment buildings and throw cars at monster things. The sound of the ceiling coming down had probably sounded like a party starting. Like some kind of siren call of stuff smashing. Hulk comes through what's left of the ceiling in another rush of earth and scree, making growly lowing noises like some kind of predatory bull, snuffling at the air and then--almost weirdly--sneezing. It would be funny if he didn't look even less sane than usual.

"Hulk--" Hulk starts, complaining in that chest deep not-Bruce voice, but doesn't finish, head turning heavily, rolling almost, as he surveys the room with what's got to be the most sinister look Tony's ever seen on him. More low-burn fury than Hulk's usual smashy rage tantrum. His cheek is twitching in a suppressed emotions way that isn't usually Hulk's thing. That is, actually, supposed to be the opposite of Hulk's thing.

"Hoo boy," Tony whispers, and uselessly cocks his gun. A bullet to the head wouldn't even be a bee sting to the Hulk. And that's _if_ he notices. It's much more likely to irritate him further than slow him down, but there's not exactly a lot of options. "Thor, buddy, pal." Thor's got a chance, at least, of keeping the Hulk occupied long enough for Tony to--to nothing. Maybe climb the rubble heap, and _maybe_ find enough of a handhold to climb up and out back into the office level above. 

Hulk whuffs again, and Thor's not tackling him. He's just standing there spinning Mjolnir, and making soothing gestures with his free hand, like he's trying to talk down someone's over-excited dog. " _Really?_ " Tony comments in a whisper, wanting to call it out, but not wanting to attract the attention of Big, Green and Pissed As Hell. He's never seen Hulk quite like this, bellowing in long animal howls like an injured ape, searching and grief-stricken, pausing only long enough to take huge, sharp breaths in through his nose, scenting. Not for Clint, probably, because Natasha had said that Bruce had thought he was--dead, dissected, _something_ \--right before Hulking out, but for someone to smash. Bruce, it turns out, can't deal with grief--or maybe terror--any better than he can deal with anger. Or maybe it's the combination of all three triggering the Bruce-protecting reaction of crushing everything Hulk can get his hands on, like turning the rest of them into slush will make him feel at all better about whatever the hell it is he thinks has happened to Clint.

Thor's attempts to talk him down aren't getting very far. Hulk heaves rocks at him, and then a desk--computer and stationary and all, scattering pens and sending papers fluttering through the air, smashing the monitor against the floor to be further obliterated under Hulk's stamping feet. 

Hulk's got bits of Bruce's professor get-up still clinging to him--upsizing in a shirt and tie would probably strangle Clint to death, if not take his head half-off. It's a shame he's been raised with the residents of a wannabee safari adventure instead of with the madder version of Bruce, because then he wouldn't have had to worry about amputation by cheap plastic bracelet. Hulk's just ripped through the constriction, scraps of white shirt hanging over his shoulders and out of the waistband of his ripped slacks, and the ends of Bruce's frumpy tie--pulled out of it's knot and inexplicably still hanging around his neck--flap as Hulk hurls a chair into the wall beside Thor, making his rumbling gorilla sound again, low enough in pitch that Tony can feel it vibrating through the floor and his own body. It's like being at a very loud, not-good concert.

Thor has no idea what's behind the rampage, Tony realizes. With his comm four-fifths of the way to Steve, he's missing the Natasha check-ins entirely. "He thinks Clint's dead," Tony risks, poking his head up over the desk, "Tell him all birds go to heaven. It worked on me for my goldfish."

Thor glances up through the ceiling well and the busted out window at the top like he's contemplating the logic of that. He could hammer-fly out now, if it didn't mean abandoning Tony, and he could grab Tony if it didn't mean Tony leaving cover and joining him at the epicenter of the Hulk's rage. Everything is such a problem without the armor. He's not sure how Natasha manages in just her ninja tights, but he calls, "Widow? Please be in the neighborhood," anyway. "I have a Hulk and a gun."

The response he gets is drowned out by something banging, sounding heavy and metal and like it's hitting with considerable impact. It's definitely coming from Clint's end of the comm, because the murmur he'd made out from Natasha had been calm and not like she's having steel slabs thrown at her. "Barton?" he hisses, "Bark twice--"

There's no bark. Just a static clatter--the comm falling or being kicked aside--and a rumble. Not as deep as the Hulk, but definitely bigger than the fox. "What's going on? Clint?"

"Where is he?" Natasha demands, "I'll back him and Steve up."

"Him and Steve? I have a Hulk. A mad, sad, very upset Hulk who's having a grumpy day."

"Sorry, Tony."

So much for regular humans stick together. "Above ground. Someplace where you can smell grass and flowerbeds and dirt. And Steve."

"Useful," Natasha comments, and then says, "Whoops," followed by the sound of running, a clatter and two single pops of gunfire before she's back on the line, asking loudly, "Hawkeye? Location, please?"

She gets the nonsense rumbling and the banging and something rattling heavily, and Tony's not sure why she thought she'd do better than him. Clint clearly has no human speech ability at the moment and is probably distracted by whatever Steve is yelling at him about, his voice dropping in and out of range of the comm. 

There's a hard thump and the sound of heavy breathing and then Steve saying, "Oh god. What did--?" and Clint's rumble, both of them muffled and a little distant.

Hulk bellows, scattering desks, splintering them against the walls, drawers flying like big rectangular projectiles, staplers and scissors falling to the floor with a plastic clatter. Sealed syringes too, driving home the fact that as benign as half of the things in the lab are, it's still a lab. There's shifters--people--probably still locked up in the cage room and Tony's glad he'd listened to Clint's _they'll be in the way_ , but if they don't stop the Hulk or at least point him in a different direction, it'll all be the same anyway. Those doors aren't going to hold if Hulk decides to tear through them.

The glove boxes go next--Tony really hopes there's nothing hazardous left inside, even if that's the whole point of having them in the first place--followed by a cabinet of folders and a cart of beakers and test tubes. More glass to add to what's already littering the floor. The foot space of the desk isn't going to be any kind of shelter when the Hulk gets to the end of the row, but Tony ducks in anyway.

Just over Hulk's roaring he can hear Steve say, distantly, "Clint? Is that--? Clint, your _eye_ ," and that must mean he's face-to-face with the lion. It's a relief that Steve recognizes him, but it also brings up the question of why Clint's going with a depth-perception-less form that Steve's only heard about before just now. It's a pretty good way to be murdered, springing that on a super soldier who might or might not have been fighting lions all day long.

He doesn't have time to sort it out. The Hulk's close, and getting closer, snuffling softly before he exhales in loud bursts. Even in the dim light of the lab, he's casting a shadow, ill defined and faint, but falling over the desk to darken the floor in front of Tony's hideout. A looming, indistinct shape. 

He should move. Or, really, not move. And not breathe. And maybe avoid blinking. And in a second he'll probably have to sneeze. It's how it always happens. It's practically a classic lead-up to meeting one's demise. Or at least to discovery, with the Hulk involved, it's really the same thing.

Thor should be instigating a flying tackle any second. Or at least a distraction. Maybe an escape. 

Something scrapes, and that's _it_. Tony bolts like a flushed rabbit, scrambling on all fours on the pebble strewn-floor before finding his feet and making a break for--

"Fuck. Fuck. I did not think this out."

Playing matador with Hulk is probably not the smartest defensive action he's ever taken, and it's not going to do any more to deter him than it had the bird, but it's all Tony has to shield himself with, unless he wants to try manila folders or one of the staplers. Which might actually work better than holding out Clint's torn shirt like he's hiding behind it and decidedly not looking as the Hulk shuffles his way over, scattering debris with his feet, kicking bits of broken office furniture and lab equipment. Plastic bounces off Tony's shin, not painful, but startling enough to make him gasp. 

"Thor. Thor. C'mon. Take downs. Do it now."

"Do not move," is Thor's brilliant advice. Tony can hear _him_ moving, circling slowly, like he stalking something and afraid of startling it.

" _Thor_."

Natasha says, "Tony? What's going on?" but it's not exactly the best time to give her the run down. Not with Hulk's hot breath blowing right in his face, his bulk close enough that Tony can practically feel the body heat radiating off him, and the movement of air when he turns his big green, not-Bruce head.

Bruce is going to feel _so bad_ about this later. Tony really hopes JARVIS tells him where the really, _really_ good stuff is because he's going to need it. At the wake, or whatever they decide to do. It'll be something restrained and dignified, sadly. If Steve has any say, he'll probably insist on maintaining decorum and respectability and waste a perfectly good funeral. 

Or, hopefully, they'll all have the decency to lie like hell to Bruce and sidestep the whole guilt issues problem. "Tell him it was the bear," Tony manages to whisper, "that ate me."

"Who's eating what?" Natasha demands, "Somebody give me a location."

Hulk _whurf_ -s, a weird blowy noise and Tony scrunches his face up, bracing for impact--or slow crush, whichever--but it doesn't come. After a minute, he risks cracking an eye open.

"Bruce?" It's not Bruce. It's still the Hulk, sniffing at the shirt Tony's holding out like a flimsy shield, and even if Clint's clothes are distracting him--or maybe just confusing him--it's probably a bad idea in the long run, because _if_ Hulk can smell Clint on them, they also probably smell as much of panic and bird spit. It's not making them a very convincing innocent party, but maybe, if Hulk has any logical capacity left, he'll at least realize that Clint can't be dead and--whatever. Stuffed into a test tube somewhere, maybe-- _and_ have recently been in the vicinity.

Maybe it'll slow him down. A little bit. Enough for--

The comm crackles loudly, making Tony startle and twitch, but then Clint's saying, muffled, "Just put it in."

"What the hell happened to--?" there's another crackle, cutting Steve off for a couple of seconds before his voice comes back, "--bit out of uniform there, Hawkeye."

Clint laughs, that not-really-amused laugh he uses when missions go sideways in unpredictable ways and Steve makes a soft huffing sound. His own dark chuckle filling Tony's ear as the Hulk _whuff_ -s again, in an explosion of hot, damp breath that goes right through the shield of flimsy cloth and into Tony's face. 

Hulk's not smashing. Tony whispers, "Clint?"

"It's Steve. Tony, I _told you_ \--" 

Not to trade Clint. Leave it Cap to remember where they'd left off. "We've moved on since then," Tony hisses, "We have different problems now." He can feel his hands shaking now that his brain's caught up to the fact that he's still alive, and that the Hulk isn't doing more than standing there, making his angry bull blowing noises and--when Tony cracks an eye open to look--tilting his head like a confused dog.

"--gonna follow me," Clint's saying, voice closer to the comm again, and the Hulk looks confused as _hell_ , and like he might be in pain. There's a hard rattling noise, a metallic _thump thump thump thump_ , but with some clang in it. "Can't go slow, Cap. Sorry."

Hulk leans close, and Tony's heart nearly stops, but all he does is tilt his head against Tony's, close enough that his hair brushes the side of Tony's face and it's the goddamn closest he's ever been to the Hulk while not cased in his armor. He can hear Thor's feet crunching as he tries to find a good Hulk-tackling angle, but there's really no way to do that now that won't result in a really, really bad outcome, at least on Tony's side of the deal.

"That's a lot of gunfire, Barton," Steve says, in his _leading you now_ voice, firm and decisive and comfortingly himself even though his voice sounds raspy and thick, like he has a bad cold and the worst sore throat ever. 

Gunfire. _That's_ what that sound is. Probably hitting something solid and metal like the cage doors. Tony can place it now, and oh _fuck_. 

Clint says, "Stay low," and Tony can _hear_ the smirk and the godawful, stupid plan in it and even with Hulk literally breathing down his neck, he has to say,

"Clint. Don't--" 

Just as Natasha says, "Cap--"

"You have a second," Clint says, like it's in response to something Steve's doing. "And whatever you do, don't trip." He laughs after it, the lunatic, but Tony doesn't have time to process it any further, because the Hulk makes a hurt, confused noise and grabs for Tony's neck. Chest. Something. 

He slams his eyes shut and for several seconds all he can hear is the rush of blood in his ears and his own heart, but the drag on his shirt isn't doing anything but pulling the back of his collar into his neck, and then someone make a low, moaning sound, and says, "What--what the hell happened?"

\-----

Bruce doesn't look too good, leaning against the wall but wisely not sitting, considering he's only about half dressed and the floor is a laceration danger zone. He looks grey and tired, but he's only about half caught his breath when he manages to ask, "Clint--?"

Tony points at his ear. "On comms. You want to talk to him? Or Steve? They're fine." Even if not for very much longer. Tony can practically hear them hatching the stupidity. 

The information doesn't seem to make Bruce feel any better. "But--Oh _god_." 

"Don't throw up. Unless it's that or another Hulk-out, in which case hurl away."

"Oh my god."

He'd tell Bruce it's okay, except that his own heart is still slowing down and he's suddenly aware of being soaked in cold sweat, of his shirt sticking to his back and armpits. Instead he takes a breath and says, "Widow. Do you have Cap?"

"Not there yet. I have him on chatter."

"Oh," Bruce says again, in a different tone. Like something's just occurred to him, then scrubs at the bridge of his nose. "Natasha. How'd she--? Where's--?"

"You split up. Now it's you, me and Thor." It's not really necessary to say that, because Thor's standing right there, but Bruce might not be processing too well just yet, judging by how he's stuck on tonal variations of _oh_.

"I--did I hear Clint?"

"On comms," Tony repeats, pointing to the earpiece again, "He's okay. He has Steve. Nat's heading to them. Are you alright?"

Bruce snorts. " _Me?_ Yes. Sure. Did I," he gestures, small and wobbly, at the mess of the room and swallows, "All this?"

"Only partly. There was also a gun battle and a cave in and a thing where Thor broke some windows." Bruce is somewhat smaller in the shoulders than Clint, but he fits into the ripped shirt, even though it hangs off him a little, pre-split at the seam of an arm and in a ragged gash across the back. It's not that much of an improvement over no shirt at all, but Tony has a new respect for running around in the face of danger feeling too-naked and Bruce seems alright with it, or possibly just doesn't notice the state of the thing yet. Either way, he lets Tony toss it over his shoulders, then starts doing up the remaining buttons like he's on auto-pilot. "Do you need to sit? I can turn a desk right-side up to keep you off the glass. Maybe put a chair back together?"

Bruce scrubs his eyes again, then says, "I--I think I lost my glasses."

On the other end of the comms, Clint says, "Take a deep breath, Cap."

_Fuck_. "Widow? _Natasha!_ "

"I heard shooting. I'm heading there now," she says, with enough of a crack in her mission calm that Tony knows she knows she's not going to make it in time to back up and-or stop whatever it is that's going on up Steve's way and even with half the team sharing comms--Tony guesses Bruce doesn't have their spares anymore--Thor doesn't wait for Tony to pass a message on, getting under the smashed open skylight and spinning his hammer.

Bruce swallows and says, "Should we--?" and nods at Thor. Hitch a ride, he probably means, but that would just slow Thor down and force him to worry about their fragile mortal selves when he busts through the too-small opening. He's not about to avoid a Hulk smushing just to get in line for a Thor-and-window-frame smushing.

"If I leave," Thor starts, and glances out at the lab.

"We'll be fine. Go. Go. I have a gun." And a Bruce, but it's not the best time to say that, with Bruce still staring blearily around at the destruction. 

Thor's hammer swing slows a little and he gives Tony's gun a doubtful look, just the slightest bit of a frown that looks like he's trying to hide his disregard for the weapon, but it comes off condescending as hell.

"We'll be fine," Tony repeats, "We're just going to climb out the other hole in the ceiling and meet you there. _Go_ , Thor. For god's--"

Clint says, "Once we're in the hall, go left," followed by Steve making a coughing sound and then saying,

"No, Hawkeye." _That's_ a thing that Clint's likely to interpret as _go ahead, Barton. Do what you like._

" _Thor_. Go!"

Thor stops arguing and launches, leaving a rattle of broken bits of ceiling and glass as Clint says, "They won't hold us, Cap" in a tone that's just the wrong side of determined, then follows it with, "If they're hitting both of us--" then his voice drops out as he moves away from Steve.

"Sent you some backup," Tony tells Steve, and goes to haul Bruce upright by his arm, pulling him away from the wall and ignoring his questioning look, "Move, Banner. We're climbing your Hulk hole. And grab that gun."

Bruce stumbles after him, but manages not to tilt onto his face as he scoops a dropped handgun from the mess of the floor, then spends another two minutes poking around until he finds something he can cinch his Hulk-strained pants with enough that they're not just barely hanging off his hips and he can shove the gun into his waistband without losing them entirely and even has the presence of mind to scavenge some boots off one of Tony's--or Clint's, possibly-- earlier hits. 

Climbing the rubble isn't that hard, but the hole in the ceiling is a little too far and too high to climb, so he leads Bruce over it--scampering up and then down the other side like kids in a sand pile--and back the way he and Thor had come, down the hall back to the elevators, even though they're probably shut down now. 

There's a squeal of metal over the comms, and Bruce stops to give him a concerned look when he flinches at it. "Jesus, Cap. What are you two--"

Steve yells something that breaks up before it reaches Tony's ear, and hits him as a painful garble of electronic snapping that ends with, "Hell, Barton," followed by gunfire and human voices and what would be screeching in a smaller cat, but is instead a series of rumbling yowls, and then Steve yelling at the top his lungs and the sound of something smashing, and then a thump.

"Steve? Cap?"

"Still here. Clint--God damn--"

"What?" Tony yells, and hears Bruce echo him, lower and more questioning. He waves him to silence, but before he can question Steve further, something crackles across the line, and it's a good fifteen seconds before he can get them back--that Bruce spends repeating, 

"Tony, what's happening?" like Tony would fill him in after one supposed-teammate-death related Hulk-out already and while they're in a possibly locked-down hallway. There's only so many near-Hulk experiences he's willing to endure in the space of a day.

"I don't know," he says, but adds, "They sound alive."

The elevators are down, as expected, so he leads Bruce past them and down the hall in the other direction, trying knobs as they go and swinging doors open with their backs to the wall like cooler spies than Clint and Natasha, and like maybe they should have a theme song. He's not sure at all what Bruce's marksmanship is like, and if he's any better at placing a bullet than he'd been with Clint's arrows, but at least he isn't likely to be shot to death, even if he turns out to be useless at cover fire and teammate saving.

There's silence in the lab and over the comms, until Bruce clears his throat and then says, "We should get the--There were kids."

Tony glances back, but Bruce seems to have a grip on his child mistreatment and lab trauma overlap. "I know. Natasha said." The hall's pretty empty. That's probably thanks to the Hulk, so maybe there's a benefit to his sudden, unplanned appearance other than excavation.

"Some of them--" Bruce pauses. Tony doesn't really want to hear the rest, and takes a step away to be as far out of hearing range as possible without making Bruce suspicious of his evasion tactics, but what he says is, "Some of them were really small."

Spoken like _Bruce_ hadn't been kind of runty as a kid. Tony quirks an eyebrow at him, and Bruce snorts. "No. I mean. _Young_ , Tony. Some of them are really young."

"We can't do anything right now. We have a pea shooter a piece and bad clothes and your shoes don't even fit." 

"You think they'll care about my shoes?" It's flat. Tony can't tell if that's a post-Hulking addled question, or Bruce sarcasm.

"I think they'll care when someone shoots at us and you trip on your laces and land on them. D'you think they're all--" He shoves the idea of out of his head. Even if they're all shifters, an army of kitten and puppies isn't going to do anyone much good, except maybe Thor and Natasha when they get back to New York City's park system, and that's _if_ the kids don't have parents to return them to.

They find a break room where they both drink from the sink tap and eat anything that's in a sealed package--potato chips and cookies and multiple packs of M&Ms and plastic-wrapped mini pastries. It feels like holding vigil in a hospital, for the four minutes before they head back out in their search for an exit.

"They're... _little_ , Tony," Bruce says, picking back up and sounding a little bit like he might cry, even though it's maybe the combination of exhaustion and hunger and sudden sugar hit screwing him up. 

"We'll go back for them. I don't have my snuggly."

Bruce stops to look at him, then shakes his head and steps past. A lightbulb further down the hall is on the fritz, blinking, then steadying then blinking again. "I know what a snuggly is," Tony calls after him, "I talk to people who aren't you guys. Who do people things." Bruce checks a door, then kicks it in when the handle clicks and won't turn. It's maybe a little impressive.

"Maybe not _that_ small," he allows, then stops again. This starts-and-stops Bruce isn't that conducive to breaking out of places. "They had--animals," he says suddenly, saying that last in a really unsure tone. Tony gives him a little shove. 

"Looking for stairs, Bruce." Or maybe another connecting tunnel.

"I thought they'd--I thought it was _Clint_."

Tony shoves him again, because letting Bruce stop might mean he'd _stay_ stopped. "You did this already. Clint's fine." Last he'd checked anyway.

"I didn't realize--Do you know how many _exotics_ there are out there?" He says the word like it's dirty or tastes awful as it forms in his mouth, "I mean, there's a pretty good wild animal trade in this country. And that's not even counting--" 

"Whale watchers?" Tony interrupts, to get him off whatever track he's on, "Seal hunters? Those kids that raise hedgehogs in their gardens?"

"Internationally. Where there's more contact. Mahouts. Monkey tamers. Snake charmers. That kind of thing."

"Duckherds."

Bruce twitches but allows it. "I saw a--a tiger." He doesn't sound that sure that he's really seen a tiger and Tony doesn't want to know what's causing that note of uncertainty. He can imagine the line diagrams from the failed experiments book all on his own and see Jar Thing's wrongly placed limbs, gruesome in the dim light of his arc reactor and phone flashlight app. "And I thought--" Bruce stops to shake his head. None of the sentences he starts are the one he actually finishes with, and this time he can't seem to figure out where he's really going.

They're in another lab. Smaller, and less officey. More pharmaceutical looking and with no side room for cages , either. It's more for chemical testing and maybe some kind of development, probably, and not whatever macrobiology oriented horror show had been happening at the other end of the place. 

"What are the numbers on this thing?" Bruce finally asks, "I know I told Clint he could find people, but--"

"Not that big," Tony guesses, "Even if you count the border collies. This is a collection. It just looks like a lot when they're all in one place." 

"There's one of me," Bruce points out, "And everyone knows about the Hulk."

That's at least partly because no one's taken Bear Guy car smashing downtown, but Tony _mm-hmm_ -s and doesn't mention it, skirting his way around the lab, then through the doors at the far end and waves Bruce over when they open onto another hall instead of a dead end medical room or holding cell. Somewhere around, there has to be a service entry of some kind. Someplace to haul all that equipment down through. It's not like the solid cage doors could be assembled on-site like some kind of mad science IKEA set. All they have to do is walk around enough. They'll stumble onto a way up and out eventually. Between the two of them, they should even be able to finagle their way through the lock-down. 

As long as they aren't waylaid by some kind of panther cub.


	27. Chapter 27

The cell is suffocating, if he lets himself think about it. If he's been outside of it for more than a few hours at a time, and let himself get used to the space and the daylight coming in from above, and talking with people. The silence in his little box is overwhelming, after. The small space and the dark crushing the air out of him. When the door opens, every part of him screams _get out, get out_ , and he has to choke it down. Remind himself he won't get far and that trying will make it worse. 

If it wasn't for the fire and the smoke and the _gun_ fire, he's not sure that he'd have had it in him to grab the opportunity when the lab is plunged into chaos and no one is guarding or watching anything anymore, much less him. Still, the escape attempt sends as much panicked adrenaline through him as the destruction he's leaving behind. Even blocked by trees and branches, the breadth of the sky is overwhelming. Too wide, too open, too _big_. No wall or door or painted directional arrow anywhere, maybe for miles.

Still, as soon as his feet touch earth, he _runs_ , ignoring his burnt hide and the fact that he has no idea where he is and has no clothes or money or shelter. That he doesn't know how to live in the woods or find his way out of them. He just pelts through the trees, smoke-blinded and with his lungs and throat burning, until he can't take another step.

And even then all he can think is that he needs to run. That he can't risk losing the open space and the fresh air again.

\-----

Clint and Steve must have gotten out of their mess, because Tony can hear them over the comms--Clint talking just too far from the mic to make out more than partial words, and Steve chewing him out, a little incoherently. Tony can't tell exactly what horrifyingly half-baked thing Clint's done, but Steve sounds really, really put out. He also sounds a little worse for wear. His berating is a little broken-up, and sounds gaspy and wheezing and like he might be considering redeveloping his asthma. 

"You guys okay?" Tony asks, when he's sure it won't distract Steve from his staying alive efforts. He and Bruce are still poking their way through the lab, blissfully unharassed. The guards probably think that the Hulk's down here doing that job for them, which is a point in favor of rent-a-cop slackassery as far as Tony's concerned.

Not that facing down the Hulk is likely to be in _anyone's_ contract. That and alien life form husbandry is kind of an unfair stipulation. It was probably in the small print, tucked between non-disclosure provisions. Tony kind of wonders when and where the nabbing and purchase of kids and other people's sometimes-tigers comes up in the hiring process. Because anyone who'd sign up for that maybe _deserves_ the Hulk visitation.

"Steve?" 

Steve and Clint are still at it. Clint motor-mouthing and Steve still kind of gasping. Between being manic on one side and asphyxiating on the other, they don't sound like they've gotten away in the best shape. Tony gives them a more-than-fair portion of a minute to respond, but taps his earpiece when Steve doesn't get back to him, knowing it'll make an annoying, staticky thump on the other side. "How many pieces are you guys in? Cap?" 

Steve takes a breath, then rasps, "Shut up, Tony," which probably means he's fine, and he sounds more like he's concentrating on catching his breath than like he's frantic, so Clint's probably okay, too.

"I think they're good," Tony reports to Bruce, and nods at the ceiling, "I don't want to suggest another Hulk encounter, but--"

Bruce ignores the proposal, peering into the hall at the far end of the lab using a sneaking technique that suggests he's been paying more attention to gumshoe flicks than Natasha-tips. 

"We were on the way out, Bruce," Tony reminds him, "It's not the time to be blinded by mad science."

"I know. I just--"

"You okay? You need something? Do you want to go back for more M&Ms?"

Bruce makes a soft puffing noise, somewhere between exasperation and laughter, but at least he sounds a little lighter. Like he's been knocked slightly off whatever track he'd been getting onto. Or back onto. Bruce and labs and experimentation being a bad mix was probably something they could have foreseen and prepared for if they hadn't been so busy worrying about the bad mix of _Clint_ and labs and experimentation and the possibility that _Steve_ and labs were in active process of becoming a bad mix.

He has Steve sounding like hell in his ear, and Bruce going _back_ to sounding like hell. Great. Just great.

"Seriously, Bruce. I'm not taking this shit from you right now."

Bruce gives him a look. It's a lot like his I-don't-think-it's-a-good-idea-to-try-building-that look, which is a bit out of place, but it's also a relief. At least Bruce is _trying_ to do his mildly exasperated, wiser doctor thing. "I'm fine, Tony."

"What are you looking at over there, anyway?" They need to be heading upwards. Hopefully in a way that won't lead them into the same kind of mess it sounds like Clint and Steve had just managed to wriggle--or haphazardly thrash--out of.

There's some kind of Natasha-Steve communication going, Steve still sounding like he's run a few too many laps for his own good, and Natasha out of breath, but in a mission-cool, more collected way. Further away, he can hear Thor, and that's good because it means one of them--he can't tell which--either has someone to back them up, or else has someone to back them up that isn't Clint, whose judgment is being powered by panic and flight-or-flight desperation. Left to their own devices, it sounds like he and Steve have been falling back on Clint-logic. Thor, if he's with them, will at least beat back the hordes while they regroup and maybe buy Steve some time to regenerate some--limbs, Tony was going to go with, but looking at Bruce's pale face makes that seem like a bad thought to entertain. Like it might be entirely possible.

Or not, he tells himself. Steve's too calm, and Clint's not getting on the comms to shout for back-up. Bruce's suppressed panic-terror-horror is just quietly spreading itself around, infecting him with Bruce's freak-out. "What," Tony starts, hating that he knows Bruce is going to _tell_ him, "was it? That you thought had happened to Clint. What did you find?"

Bruce's head rises and then falls, slowly. Like he's checking something in the hallway out, even though it's clearly a cover. After a minute he answers, "Tiger."

"Uh-huh." 

Bruce doesn't look back at him. Just keeps studying the hall, his shoulders hunching a bit in what's pretending to be a shrug. "Others. They'd taken them apart. There was a--" Bruce stops to rub his eye. Tony's not sure if he's got a headache, got dust in it, or is just pretending like it's one of those two things. Or maybe an eyelash. "They had its," Bruce stops again, like he's not sure of that pronoun, then swallows and says, "Its brain out. It was just this--" He gestures, indicating something amorphous, maybe, or a squishy ball--it's kind of unclear--then he lets his hand drop again.

"It wasn't Clint," Tony reminds him, and Bruce turns to give him a watery, fake as hell smile. 

"I know. I _know_. But--Tony if we'd _lost_ him," Bruce lets it trail off. 

"It's a bit late to question the plan now, doc."

Bruce snorts. Looks up at the ceiling--maybe in the guesstimation direction of his gruesome discovery--and then back at Tony. There's a weirdly intense look in his eyes, but it's possible that's just a result of Bruce making up for his lost glasses by concentrating extra hard. 

"They were willing to _buy_ him back. They _did_ buy him back."

"I'm thinking of refurbishing the kitchen with that," Tony tells him, thinking _tiger-proofing_ and about Clint's lab-taught furniture caution. 

"But they have a whole--" Bruce gestures upwards. Probably meaning the kids, wherever they are on the next floor. "Collection," he finishes, using Tony's word, and makes a face. "What's one more?"

It's not like Tony hasn't turned it around for himself. His brain's been picking at the whole thing too, ever since the burnt-out shell of Original Sphinx. Ever since it had become clear that this wasn't just some spoiled fucker needing something to do with his spare change that would impress his yacht club.

"That's how you usually end up with a hundred and one of something," Tony tells him, even though he knows Bruce means, _why the trouble?_ , "You start telling yourself, well, we already have the fifteen."

"They have more than fifteen. They have--" Bruce goes unfocused, like he does when he's looking inwards, trying to grab onto and sort through the flashes of things the Hulk had seen or heard or done. "Others."

"Bear guy."

"Yeah. But _others_." Other things, he means. Not bears. Maybe mountain lions and wolves.

"Raccoons," Tony suggests, even though that might be a bit too nefarious. Clint might be _sort of_ vermin some of the time, depending how one felt about chicken stealing scavengers, but there were _limits_. "Let me pre-warn you--if we run into an army of raccoons, I'm out of here." 

Bruce doesn't answer right away, stepping out into the hall he'd been surveying and leaving Tony to catch up. "Good luck with that. You might manage an army of golden retrievers. Are they still America's favorite house pet?" he says when Tony follows, gun ready in a way that Bruce's _isn't_. Maybe Bruce isn't as worried about taking a head-shot since his armor's always been _inside_ \--sort of--rather than shedable outer wear, which means that maybe he's picked up the gun more to cover Tony than to protect himself. 

That's sort of touching, even if Bruce is shit at using it. 

"Army of cats," Tony suggests, and tugs Bruce across the hall and into a doorway so they'll be sheltered while he listens to the lab around them, thinking he's maybe heard something. It's silent other than the hum of fluorescent lights. It's kind of spooky, after all the earlier commotion. "Was that you, Steve?"

It's Natasha. Demanding, "Army of cats? What are you and Banner _doing_?"

"Brainstorming. We're in the rat maze and Bruce won't punch out another ceiling."

"Or," Bruce continues, not responding to that last or even acknowledging the interruption, "you'd need to get a bunch of shapeshifters and raise them with--" he stops, like he doesn't want to humor Tony by going along with any of his suggestions. "Whatever it is," he decides on, in uncreative cop-out, then walks two steps and freezes. Turns back to where Tony's still sheltering in the doorway, looking surprised--eyes a bit too wide, mouth half-open.

"Tony," he says.

Tony looks at him, not following for a few seconds, and then he looks up ceiling-ward the way Bruce kept doing. "Huh," he says, "Isn't kindergarten a bit young to be a shapeshifter?" 

"They're not quite _that_ young," Bruce says, like that's supposed to make him feel better.

\-----

In the end they get back to ground level not through a tucked-away loading door, but through an emergency fire exit. The circuitry must have been damaged at some key juncture, either by the Hulk rampage or one of the explosions, because while it's lock-down secured, it also doesn't set off any siren wail when they repurpose some lab equipment and break their way through it. At least, not as far as Tony can tell.

The yard, when they get up into the cool early morning half-light and the tweeting of birdsong, is even nicer than it had looked from surveillance-distance. He should get a place like this, someday. Complete with bridle paths leading off into the trees, but maybe minus the monsters in the basement and the stolen children of other people. And any disturbing specimen collections. 

They come out behind the faux clinic building, in the shelter of a curtain of ivy, with enough space to hunker under the foliage and close to the picturesque red brick of the building. He hadn't thought country chic could _manage_ to be ominous, but he'll never look at upstate B &Bs the same way again.

Or country estates. 

Across the lawn, there's some kind of commotion at the tasteful mansion, too distant to really get a good read on. He can see movement inside--lights and shadows moving across windows, but nothing more helpful than that. That must be where they'd had Steve, then. There's flowerbeds out in front of it, separating the drive to the front door from the rest of the broad lawn, and that's probably where Clint's _I could smell dirt_ had come from. 

Which means they'd had Clint up that way earlier, before relocation to what Tony's thinking of as The Basement. _With_ capitals.

"So, they're probably somewhere over there," Tony says, waving in the general direction. There's still lights on--round, pretty globes on decorative wrought iron posts, perfectly spaced--and that might make crossing the grass a bit risky, but it will also make the shadows more shadowy and maybe spoil some joker's night vision.

"We should get moving before it gets any lighter," Tony whispers, "Into the trees, Banner. And act casual. I think that bird might be watching us."

\-----

It would probably have been better to _not_ mention the villainous potential of songbirds to Bruce, because he jumps a little at every rustle in the brush and dry leaves. It's a sad world where the animals are untrustable. 

"I don't think they're spies, Bruce," Tony tries, trying to walk silently on the leaf cover as Bruce glances warily back the way they'd come, watching the sway of some branch. The leaves under their feet are damp with with condensation and slidey, but it's also a thick, muting layer and the wet keeps the crunch down. That's oddly comforting even if anyone close enough to hear would also be close enough to see them. "If they were spies, we'd be fucked by now." 

"Maybe we are and we just don't know it yet," Bruce offers, with Bruce levels of optimism, but he sounds a lot less worried than he looks, voice even and with a trace of dry sarcasm. Finally shaking off his freak-out and subsequent Hulk-out related freak-out.

"That's the spirit," Tony tells him, but casts a glance back at the lawn, visible through the trees. "I'm glad you're my team."

Clint and Steve aren't hard to find if they play comm Marco-Polo, but it's a bit of a do to get to them, what with having to navigate their way over by skirting around rather than cutting straight across. They're up nearer the other end, moving out and away from the estate rather than back towards Tony and Bruce on the clinic end of the set-up.

Which means that as they get closer, they're also getting further into the trees, making it harder to coordinate and navigate by shared landmarks, so that for a while, he and Bruce are just crashing around through brambles and dead bushes, Bruce hissing and swearing under his breath. Getting scraped up through his thin loaner shirt, probably. 

There's a louder crash further ahead. Tony freezes in the middle of what he hopes is a patch of benign creeper and not poison ivy, oak, or anything else rash inducing, and waves at Bruce to get down. 

"You don't do any botany, do you?" he asks, as they crouch, getting as low as they can. They're not exactly invisible, but the twig breaking and branch rustling from ahead doesn't let up.

"It's more scared of us than we are of it," Bruce tries, but that's not exactly comforting, when whatever's out there is also big and _big and scared_ is as bad a combination as _big and hungry_ or _big and angry_ , if not worse. "It's running."

"Or circling around behind us." That's a mountain lion trick, but the glimpse of orange he sees through the brush is followed by Steve's voice hissing in his comm. He takes the risk to call, "Steve?"

"Tony?" 

"Oh, _Jesus_. You scared the crap out of us." It's good to hear Steve's voice. Even if he sounds like hell. "You guys okay?"

"Yeah. Yeah, we're-- _Clint_." There's more rustling, but this time it sounds like Clint and Steve are involved in some kind of minor scuffle. 

Going over requires a bunch more stomping and shoving-through, but when they get to Steve he hasn't made much progress in his struggle, which mostly involves trying to get Clint off him. It looks like Clint's dragged him a good distance like a dead zebra--or whatever the fuck tigers ate. Deer, maybe. Or some kind of tropical version of elk--for at least a few hundred yards. Starting from when he'd picked up their crashing and Bruce's crabbing, probably.

Which isn't a good sign. It would really be more encouraging if Steve was running for cover under his own steam.

"You look like shit," Tony tells him, intentionally ignoring Clint's few seconds of paranoid snarling. 

"Tony." Steve looks just as relieved to see them, but he follows that with, " _Damn it_ , Tony," and Tony's pretty sure he's still on the _I told you not to trade Clint_ thing, even though it's worked out alright so far, glitches notwithstanding.

"Yeah, yeah. Tell it to Barton. I wasn't happy either." The tiger makes a blowy-growly noise, and a second or so later he's Clint again, with even less protection against thorns and sharp pebbles and forest nastiness than Bruce. They should have thought to root around for spare clothing or something. "You guys alright? I was going to bring you some prefab pastries, but Banner ate them on the walk over."

Clint coughs. Swallows. Makes a croaking noise, then stops to clear his throat again before managing, "Cap's shot."

"I'm fine," Steve puts in quickly, before either of them can react, "Or, just about." He holds an arm out like he's showing the limb, but he's moving easily even though his uniform is ripped and blood-stained. Tony really _should_ have brought him some cookies or something from the break room. Healing the sort of mess Steve's clothing damage is suggesting is the kind of thing that's likely to give him an appetite.

"We have to--" Bruce gestures a little awkwardly, waving a hand to indicate most of Steve, "You need anything done?"

Steve turns his arm to show the rips in the back of his uniform, dipping his shoulder to make them more visible, "Right through. Most of them, anyway. Clint got the rest." 

Clint offers a thumbs-up at that, confirming, then frowns when Bruce stops looking Steve over and turns the scrutiny on him instead. "I'm _fine_ ," he snaps, and considering Clint's lack of cover, Tony can't really blame him for not taking kindly to being ogled.

"He is," Steve says, but he sounds puzzled, "He should be--" Dead, maybe, is Tony's guess, or ground meat or at least shot through with holes and Clint looks shifty as fuck at the change in topic, which is more of a clue than Tony really needs.

"Yeah. I bet."

All of Clint's public nudity practice is coming in handy on this misadventure, because he barely looks fazed by the fact that he's hanging around a wood in his birthday suit like some kind of creeper. Tony gives him another quick look, and it doesn't even take half an ounce of genius to figure out what Clint's stupid escape plan had entailed. Not when Steve's still unpunching the holes he's had punched through him, and Clint's unscathed aside from the damage he'd already had in The Basement.

"Have a little kitty cat shield, did you?" Tony asks Steve, and reads the confusion in the way Steve's mouth twitches.

"I didn't think they missed him," he says, and looks back at Clint, frowning. Clint frowns back.

"I'm right _here_ ," he snaps, "You want to stop talking over my head?" 

Tony doesn't really want to. Clint's lab-related terror looks like it's turned into some kind of lab-related death wish, and it's sickening to consider how casually he's treating the fact that he's let people shoot the lion, locked-away damage or not. If he was Natasha, he'd whack Clint a good one, right in his damn head. The day's involved aliens, nearly being eaten a by a human-bear two-fer combo, and getting a breath or two shy of being pulped by the Hulk, and it's Clint's idea of tactics that's going to shove him over the brink. 

"Widow?" He tries, rather than dealing with Clint and the rips in Steve's clothing that are screaming _close call_ and are probably a faint echo of the damage that Clint's lion's taken. "We've got Cap and Hawkeye."

There's bursts of static on the comm, and then Natasha's voice, a bit garbled, but behind it he can hear Thor, which means that the team had effectively organized itself into groups of one-of-us-has-a-comm, and that's maybe the most functional thing they've managed to do on this jaunt, and they've managed it without anyone coordinating. Tony's about to congratulate them all on that bit of accidental good thinking, when Natasha comes back clearer, saying, "Stark. I think they've got the jet."

Crap. No wonder the grounds were so quiet. The evil chemists--or whatever they were--were busy surveilling the hills. Which probably means that being _outside_ the grounds proper may be less safe than being _inside_ it. 

"Let's rendezvous." He tells her, "Maybe Thor can give a series of piggy back rides." And if not, it's better to not be split up.

\-----

Natasha shows up with boots and clothes for Clint, because she's a miracle worker and possibly because she's intent on showing him up, but she also passes the credit on to Thor, which is _definitely_ showing him up because modesty and limelight sharing isn't really a Tony Stark kind of thing. She's also in a hurry. 

"They've got a perimeter set up," she reports, while Clint makes himself decent--not that any of them even particularly notice his _in_ decency anymore, "They're going to try to tighten up around us." Like choking fish in a net. It's a pretty good tactic if one has access to impersonating wildlife. They'd have noticed armed men tromping around and circling around behind them, but probably not rabbits or deer. Clint had mentioned deer people. He's pretty sure. "Thor's going to try to punch us a hole through, but they're pretty slippery. We don't want to end up herded apart instead."

"So what you're telling me," Tony sums up, "is that this forest is going to be full of nudists any minute now?"

Natasha cracks a smile at that. "More or less," she says. "We should move."

"The kids," Bruce starts, but Natasha's firmly in escape-and-survive mode. 

"We'll figure it out later. We have Thor and maybe the Hulk, doc. I don't think Steve and Tony are on their best game." She's not even including Clint in that, and Tony doesn't ask why. Clint's hiding his teetering on the brink pretty well, but he's also, in the past, been driven to panic by helicopters and the _threat_ of discovery, and Natasha's seeing straight through it--even without being filled in about the suicidal lion jail break scheme. She doesn't look like she's entirely happy to have to offer Clint his bow and arrows back, but it's not like they can keep him out of the action for his own good this time. 

"Everyone's been shooting that thing but you today," Tony tells Clint anyway, nodding at the bow as he gets his gun back out. "Which way, Romanov? Or Steve. Who's running this show now? I've lost track."

"Natasha?" It's a request for information, but it's as good as an answer. Steve hasn't got the lay of the land, or maybe hasn't regenerated his proper blood volume back, so giving point up to Natasha only makes sense. With the suit out of the game, she's got the best recon anyway, barring Thor's bird's eye view from earlier and Clint's fox nose. 

"If you think we can get far enough on foot," she shrugs, indicating mild doubt, which is a little bit of an understatement, considering the shape most of the team is in, "Or we can try to liberate some transport."

"I can't believe they have the jet," Tony says, "Where did you guys park anyway?"

\-----

They, probably predictably, don't get that far. Or really, they get far enough that Tony's a little impressed with their ability to sneak as a group, but just not far enough to be _useful_.

"This was probably bound to happen," he tells the rest of them, a bit like he's trying to comfort them over their failure, but really more to make it sound like he has a contingency plan. He doesn't. He's been out of plans since the EMP and the fight with the bear. Everything since then's been shots in the dark and playing by ear.

It's eerie as hell to be surrounded by purposeful animals. He'd thought that that human intent was creepy on Clint, now and then, but it's even weirder in multiple. Especially in _mismatched_ multiple. Something about wolves and antelope coordinating with each other is just unsettling. Decidedly wrong looking, even beyond the too-human glances they give each other and the subtle, too-intelligent signaling.

Thor's hammer starts spinning as soon as they start materializing out of the trees, an accelerating _thwp thwp thwp_ that's closer to Tony's head than he'd prefer. With Thor and Hulk, they'd have a chance if Steve was in better shape and in possession of his shield and if Clint wasn't so deep into whatever the hell it is that's going on with him, swinging back from reckless disregard, to what's starting to look like panic again. The way his eyes are flickering over the emerging wildlife crowd has a lot more in common with something confused and cornered than it does his regular Hawkeye rapid target assessment.

"Ratchet down, Barton," Tony hisses at him, thinking of Clint's desperate rapid-rotation shape shifting when they'd first sprung him. If he tries that now, he's going to strangle himself, or--if he manages a Banner clothing-rip-through--freak himself out even more. With everything they've sent Clint into today--even if most of it had been Clint's own idea--Tony's a little surprised he's stayed functional for as long as he has. It's not too far a leap to assume that whatever Bruce had seen, whatever the exact details of _they took them apart_ were, Clint's likely to have seen the same, and more up close and personal than chancing on it in some lab refrigerator.

Or lab morgue. Or whatever. Tony'd really prefer to stay hazy on the details himself.

"Other ideas?" Steve asks, low, when the guns come out, a ring of armed guards filling out the spaces between the wildlife. Thor and Hulk might have been able to barrel through the apes and coyotes and make an escape gap, but one spray of bullets would be enough to do the rest of them in, excepting maybe Steve, but even then. Another shooting today is hardly going to do him any good.

"I can--" Clint starts, and Tony knows where he's going with it, and hisses,

"No. I think you've used that trick up." The lion, he means, and what he's discovered is a tendency on Clint's part to use it like it's a disposable tool and not actually _Clint_. As desperate as their situation's getting, the thought makes Tony a little sick, and anyway. It's probably already shot full of holes. Clint's as likely to shift into it and drop dead as he is to shift and be useful.

"If this gets ugly," Steve says, low and to one side--talking to Thor, so Tony doesn't ask him how he can be optimistic enough to still be thinking _if_ instead of _when_ , "You get Clint out." 

"Nice, Steve," Tony snips, before Clint can voice his own protest. "Be obvious with your favorites. Nat and I get it. We just didn't think you'd rub our noses in it like this."

Steve doesn't laugh, but he does smile with one side of his mouth. A lopsided, almost stiff look with no amusement in it, and fine. So he's sticking to his promise of not letting anything happen to Clint--given way back on that first tigersome day --with more dedication than Tony had _his_ 'no labs' promise, but then, Steve isn't making the call over a hostage situation. Unless Steve's considering _them_ a part of that category. But even then, they're only just _potential_ hostages at this stage. It's not really comparable.

"No," Clint says, stubborn. Then fixes Thor with his best glare and repeats, " _No_. I'm staying."

"You can save _me_ ," Natasha offers, but she's clearly with Clint on this, or at least giving in to Clint, because she doesn't give him any argument before taking Bruce's gun from him. They're going to be suicidal together, then. Go team. 

"Bruce," Clint says, a second later, in a decisive tone, then clarifies, "You have to get _Bruce_ out."

Tony lets himself be backed up until he's as close to Clint as he can get without being in the way of his draw. "He's the one they'll--They know what he can do now." It's not likely a horde of woodland rejects can _take_ the Hulk, but, on the other hand, the squirrel rebellion's proven capability versus space things suggests it has tricks up its sleeve that they couldn't foresee.

Bruce makes a snorting noise. Impressively even sounding, considering what Clint's suggesting the outcome of this thing might be. "Everybody just calm down," he says, and Tony's not really sure that impervious-to-everything Bruce Banner should be the one doling out survival tips.

"It's the Hulk that's impervious to everything," Bruce says, when Tony points it out, and he sounds a bit put out by Tony's lumping them together, but it's not like Bruce isn't impervious by association, so really the point still stands. 

"If you have the opportunity," is Steve's suggestion, taking Clint's side and saying it easily, like the rest of them hadn't just spent the last day and change breaking him out. "Between you and Thor--There's no reason they should take _everyone_."

The ring around them is still distant, but tight. No gaps in the line that Tony can make out. The Avengers, Tony realizes, are not a unit made for out-in-the-open fighting. At least not when their artillery consists of a hammer and some arrows. And the guns, but they aren't exactly the standard choice for their outfit. Steve might be right about a good half of the team having a chance at making a run for it, but Tony doesn't see anyone volunteering to _be_ that half. 

There's movement behind the lines. It's not the man from the ruins of Original Sphinx, but someone taller. Broader. Tony doesn't recognize him, or his voice when he calls, "I thought we had a deal, Mr. Stark." His voice echoes oddly over the silence of the wide-open grounds.

"I cheat at cards, too," Tony calls back, and adjusts his grip on the gun, "What do you want with Jumanji anyway? It looks like you've got the whole collection already." And then some. Clint's lion and tiger are more than a bit of a pointless overlap. He's functionally more of a three-for-one deal than a four-for.

"Not in one package, though," the man says. Calmly. Like they aren't talking about a human being, but maybe some kind of vacation deal. Not that men like them _need_ vacation deals.

Bruce makes a little sound, but Clint takes a breath and then another, arrow tip wavering from target to target, like he can't decide where it'll be best to place his shot, when it comes to that. He'd probably offer something stupid like _let the others go_ , if he wasn't busy trying to not utterly lose his shit at the prospect of recapture. Tony really hopes he's all there enough to remember who's on what side and not just start trying to take out anything that moves in his general direction and vicinity. It'll look terrible on their record if one of them ends up dead with an arrow shaft through their head instead of a bullet.

"He's as much use to us dead as alive." If could be some kind of fucked up offer, judging by the tone, but it's probably meant as a threat. "We have others to work with in...various other capacities." 

"We're not giving anyone up," Natasha says, but low, and likely for Clint's benefit and not their adversary's.

"Tony," Clint starts. Tony shakes his head. It's probably an awful thing to do, to pre-emptively dismiss Clint's opinion when this fucker is dismissing the basic idea of Clint-as-human and instead viewing him as the sum of his scientific use. 

"What?" he asks, ignoring the annoyed frown he gets from both Clint and Natasha, "Like your animal heroes over there? They potential spare parts, too? Or do they not know about that _capacity_?"

There's too much space between them for Tony to see the man's expression as he pauses. Maybe reconsidering Clint and his uses. Or not, because he sounds a little amused when he says, "We have to sort by merit," in a conciliatory tone, like he's pacifying a child. 

So it's like choosing for Steve's super serum, but fucked up. He's not really sure what kind of _merit_ Clint might be lacking, but now that he's being presented with damned _wolf soldiers_ , it seems a bit unlikely that a man who could also be a six hundred pound tiger had washed out of rent-a-cop school for playing too rough and being mildly klutzy.

Because it's looking kind of unlikely now that Clint was ever meant to be a house pet.

"We're going to converse about 'conversant' later," Tony tells Clint, even though he doubts Clint's paying enough attention to anything he's saying to play pick-up-the-conversation. Bruce is listening though, and Natasha, who looks between all three of them and the predator ring-around and then snorts softly. Tony doesn't say that he's sickeningly relieved to realize that Clint hadn't been educated to turn him into a novelty piece companion with small talk skills, but because he was being raised to be an attack dog. It probably shouldn't feel like an improvement, but at least it'll curb his horrified imaginings. Whatever Clint had washed out on, it probably had a lot more to do with his stubbornness, unleadability, and general Clint-ness than it had his inability to avoid whacking people with a hundred-plus pounds of tiger butt.

Clint would probably not stand for child abduction no matter who'd raised him or how. Unlike bear guy and his furry woodland friends. Who probably know exactly what capacity they and other shifters are there in and don't give a shit. Were maybe raised to not give a shit and to think that they've avoided being locked in a basement and divided up into test tubes by virtue of being the animal kingdom elite.

"And by _merit_ ," Tony calls, "do you mean sociopathy? Or susceptibility to conditioning?"

The ring closes in a little more. Even with superior numbers, they're probably taking some time to work out an approach that'll minimalize casualties from their two peashooters and Clint's bow. Maybe they're aware of the damage he'd done in the basement.

"Or indifference to ethics?" he keeps suggesting.

Clint suggests, "Let them go. They don't have anything to do with this."

"Until they took what's mine."

"You took what's ours first," Tony snaps, but he expects that this _you started it_ argument is irrelevant. That they've seen too much and know too much to be anything but wiped clean out. Or possibly added to the collection, in the case of Bruce and Steve and maybe Thor, if they figure out a way to _hold_ Thor. 

"If you can get out," he says, and means everybody, even though he gives Clint a pointed look that he either misses or ignores, " _go_."

"I'll do my best to cover," Bruce says, and Tony's not sure if he's missed that he's supposed to be included in that 'go' or if he's caught the stupidly self-sacrificing bug. "Or, I will if the other guy remembers."

"No." Natasha's tone suggests that she's still considering herself the appointed leader of this op, even if that was granted based on Steve's temporary lack of a sense of direction and isn't exactly relevant anymore. "Thor. Bruce. Prioritize getting Cap and Clint out. Tony and I aren't any use to them." The bug's going around hard. Nat's got it so bad, she's sacrificing him right alongside her.

"We're not leaving you." Steve sounds horrified. 

"You can come back later."

"For _what_?" Tony demands, "We'll be _dead_."

Natasha gives him a look. Tony guesses no one was supposed to remember that part, or at least be tactful enough to not mention it if they did.

The ring tightens up a little more. Natasha tells Steve, "Thor needs one arm for Mjolnir, and you're the only one we know Hulk won't crush. He can try with the rest of us, but it's not a way I'd choose to go," and smiles at him. 

Tony says, "Jesus fuck, Romanov."

"I'd also rather they not get anyone they have an interest in keeping." She steps in a little, not closing their ranks so much as letting one shoulder bump against Clint a little. She doesn't turn her smile on him. "Sorry, Tony. I'll try to cover you, but--"

"I'm just a fleshy mortal now. Got it."

Clint swallows. Says, "Nat," like he's starting an apology, then changes it to, "Guys--"

"Shut the hell up, Barton," Tony snaps at him, then, when Clint does, adds, "You owe me so much coffee for this."

Clint doesn't answer, but at least he doesn't finish what he was about to say either. He _does_ get a stubborn look that suggests he's not about to go quietly, with Thor or otherwise, but he sets his jaw and pulls his bow into a full draw instead of going back to arguing.

Which is when Bruce's phone goes off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the update lag. My computer has flat out died, so I've only been able to get on from ipod. Which is terrible for responding to comments with, especially with that floaty AO3 response box, so I'm sorry if I haven't replied to comments.


	28. Chapter 28

The screen of Bruce's phone is busted, so there's no access to anything as fancy as caller ID, but Tony hands his gun off to Steve so he can fish the thing out of his pocket and peer at it anyway. "You expecting a call?" he asks Bruce, "Here I thought we were in the middle of something. Is this your bail-out-of-scheduled-activities excuse cover call?"

It's not just a matter of who would be calling Bruce in the middle of what is admittedly not the best date the team's ever taken him on, but of _who would be calling Bruce_. Tony thumbs the button just as the tinny ring tone starts up again and holds it to his ear, waving a hand to signal quiet. If he's going to be eaten by wolves, he might as well go out maintaining some measure of Stark business dignity.

The phone's screen isn't the only thing busted. The antenna's probably taken a good whack too, because the voice that comes over is crackled and skipping. It makes the country estate of alien and earthly horrors seem even more surreal and distant from the real world.

"Tony--?" The phone spits, then dissolves back into brief static. Tony puts his hand over the receiver.

"It's for me," he tells Bruce.

"Of course it is."

"Tony," the phone demands, stops to spit electronic garble, then continues with"--the hell is going on?" Garble. "--are you?" Then the reception unexpectedly improves to deliver a perfectly clear, "No one has a _goddamn_ location on any of you and your phone is _blitzed_. I had to get this number off JARVIS."

That's pretty slick thinking, even if Bruce probably wouldn't appreciate Tony's home computer giving out his personal contact information. "What? Are you checking up on me?"

He hears Rhodey take a breath and let it out. Slowly. "When you say things like _if I'm not back by_ and then _disappear--_ "

"By tomorrow night, I said. I have a good nine, ten hours." Or fifteen minutes, by the way things look to be going.

"Your suit signal's dead. I called--"

"Oh, Christ." Clint's not going to like the calling of the cavalry. Especially not the snoopy nosy cavalry that tends to make Avenger business their business and vice versa. He's pretty sure Clint doesn't want any of this shit on file or discussed or even known by select, eyes-only, security cleared individuals.

Who are working for the government.

On the other hand, whatever Clint's been afraid of all these years is pretty much smack in the middle of playing itself out. Whatever mess might be left in the aftermath of the out-of-team interference, at least it's an _after_ , and the prospect of there being one of those had been looking pretty slim.

"I want to remind you," he tells Clint, "That you said I could tell Rhodey."

Clint's gaze flicks to him. Fast and sudden, and almost like the idea of someone acting on his tigerous secret info is worth panicking over when they're also all about to be murdered. Or at least, when Tony and Natasha are about to be murdered, if her partial-team escape attempt goes according to fucked-up plan.

"I had a bead on the jet," Rhodey's going on, not realizing that he's interrupting their life and death situation, "until a couple hours ago--"

"I don't know where that's parked," Tony says, "but it should be close by somewhere. Relatively. And also, don't tell SHIELD we let it get taken over. If you need a signal, try having J scan for Banner."

"You--? Tony _what the hell is going on?_ "

"I don't want you to be alarmed," Tony says, eyeing the animal kingdom frontline, "but I think you should move to a better apartment. You don't get enough sun in that place, and it's depressing. So in the event that my place needs a tenant, I want you to know that--"

Something moves, out beyond Steve. Jerky and aborted. Tony's view of it is mostly blocked by super-shoulder, but is stretching monstrously as his skin flushes green. It's a bit too sudden for comfort considering Tony's few-hours-ago run in with the big guy hadn't been the most relaxing situation he'd ever been in, but at least he's not snapping this time, and that means a more--hopefully--controlled rampage. 

"Tony?" The phone demands, signal cracking again. 

Mjolnir's _thwp-thwp-thwp_ picks up in response. Any second now, Thor's supposed to grab Clint, and only _maybe_ Tony, and hit the sky, but before he can get proper helicopter lift out of his hammer, Clint's gone. Out of easy reach, and firing with steady Hawkeye precision, and if Tony couldn't see his face, he'd never guess that Clint was anything like edging close to being out of his mind. 

He looks cold and blank in a way that's very different from Natasha's detached focus. It's the opposite of compartmentalization--everything spilling over until there's no expression that can cover it.

" _Fuck._ "

Tony doesn't bother to shut the phone off. Just jams it back into his pocket, and grabs his gun back from Steve. It might be traumatizing for Rhodey to get the real-time feed of the Avengers being trampled to death by deer, but at least it's not a dramatic cut-to-silence.

On the other hand, the pop of gunfire might be making it through the connection and that's probably sending a less than positive message of how things are going. Tony can't tell if the bullets are landing anywhere near them, or how Clint and Natasha can stand there with both eyes open firing back, without any kind of real protection, time after time. 

"Remind me," Tony yells at them, "To make suits for everybody. Or armored protection bubbles. I'm putting you all in bullet safe hamster balls."

Something big and twisty launches itself at Hulk, and Natasha's plan is going the usual way of Avengers plans--sideways, and in the general direction of _to shit_. Whatever focus Bruce's internal memory banks might have still have had for the _get Steve out_ plan disappears with a howl of rage. Tony's not sure how he can tell the difference between _this_ tiger and Clint, but he grabs it with both hands before it can so much as make contact and _hurls_ , sending the cat bouncing and skidding across the too-pretty lawn, where it lies with its chest heaving. Every bone in its damn body probably broken, and as big as predatory cats might be, they've got _nothing_ on monsters like the Hulk or the denizens of the underground alien zoo.

Steve swats a wolf away while he's caught up thinking horrible, dark things, and Tony pulls the trigger a couple of times, just to stay in the fight. "Oh my god. They don't want _Clint_."

"Tony, _focus_."

"I am focused. I'm _multiply_ focused." Enough to know that they're holding their line in the break-skirmish-break rhythm of things, but not making any real headway. Seeing Steve wrestle unlikely animals seems like it should be a more rewarding experience, but it's really not working out that way.

Hulk, on the other hand. Hulk's having a _great_ time, bowling through the endangered species list like a villain in a terrible kid's movie. Using hands and even teeth, and a small child, identified early enough, before their shift potential had been used up, could really learn to love the big lug in his less murderous moments. Could, maybe, if captive alien wildlife had any of the lovability potential of gigantic humanish rage beasts, learn to shift a space monster. 

Learn to shift a space monster, or, if whatever variable allowed Clint's multiple forms could be excised from his brain and recreated or tested for, shift three monsters or more. 

And could then be raised to obedience like this previous generation of yahoos, into a proper army of actual space horrors.

 _Clint_ isn't useful to them. Not anymore than he'd been years ago when he'd washed out of goon school. Kids _like_ Clint are what's useful to them. All they need adult shifters for is the goddamn model for comparison. 

"We have SHIELD incoming," Tony yells, directing it mostly at Steve, "Just keep us fragile little ones from getting smushed in the next fifteen, twenty minutes, and maybe we'll even walk out of this."

And maybe they'll manage to keep Clint undissected. That's more than probably where he'd been heading. They're _never_ hostage trading him again. Just the slightest lag on their rescue effort--a lost signal, a misdirection--and who fucking knew what might have happened. How much use could have been gotten out of a living Clint before they moved on to the next stage of research.

Steve gives him a little corner-of-the-eye glance. "Is that--? Are you including _you_ in that?" Tony's a little too busy aiming and scaring himself to have much resources left to follow his own comments, so he ignores Steve in favor of providing Clint with cover fire. 

Hulk's doing the same for Natasha, scattering a small pack of jackals trying to get the jump on her. There's a lot less gunplay involved in this whole thing than Tony had expected, considering they'd lifted _their_ weapons off lab guards. He'd kind of thought the shooting would be more of a thing.

"They're still trying to take us alive. Let's try to not be so dangerous that they just break out the rockets." _Dawdle_ is probably an even less solid plan than _survive_ , but just as the words come out of his mouth, everything falls into a kind of lull. 

He half expects to hear the whine of SHIELD jets--or _a_ jet, at least--but there's nothing other than the high yip of some injured not-animal, too panicked to shift back, and the harsh sound of Hulk's harsh, bear-like huffing. 

It's an opportunity to regroup. Get back-to-back with Thor to use him as shelter, or sort-of kind-of skulk behind Hulk's everything-proof bulk, while staying out of smash-range, but Clint just puts another arrow to his bowstring, keeping his feet planted where he stands. _Way_ too out in the open.

Tony wonders, absently and kind of horribly, where his aim falls on the scale of freaky Clint things that might be explained by having his brain picked apart and examined on slides. 

"Stark." It's in the patient, smug tones of the upper hand. Obviously, this is going to be another offer to deal. Like he thinks he's got Tony optionless and on the ropes.

"Is he talking to me?" Tony asks, peering around the Hulk, "Why do they always talk to _me_? You're the Captain."

"Take the deal," the man says, and bingo. It's nice to be reminded that this whole thing is supposedly a property dispute. 

"No dice." Tony calls back. 

"If you think your attack on this research facility will go unnoticed--" It's left hanging, and _that_ kind of blank-check threat implies there's interest at play here that goes way up, but the exact shape of where the connections go is unclear. Just a vague outline of _bad news_ lurking behind the front of supposedly innocent scientific inquiry.

"Yeah. Well. Sorry for not being more supportive of your Dr. Moreau bullshit, but we're not real big fans of abominations." The Hulk moves, off in his peripheral vision. Tony adds, "Mostly, anyway, but we've used up our exception."

"That's not a dig at Barton," Tony clarifies, for the sake of within-earshot Avengers. "Thor's purse dog doesn't make the monster cut."

Clint's too focused on the zoological frontline to care about or even notice verbal digs. Tony's not sure at all that he'd even registered the impending arrival of help, or if all he's seeing is suit guy and the inside of the cell. Other cells. Maybe he's tasting his torn up mouth. He's making sort of strange frowning faces anyway, so it's either that or he's developing a facial tic.

Then Hulk twitches. Tilts his head like he's listening to something distant, followed by two of the wolves and a minute later then Tony hears, faintly, a low sound that might be engines, might be repulsors. 

Or might be more of these shifty assholes. 

Either way, it's a countdown to this stand-off going one way or the other, and Tony guesses things are finally leaning their way, because a second later, the gunfire starts again, with a new enthusiasm. 

And then everything turns into noise and chaos, and then he's thrown down and pinned.

Under fucking _Steve_. 

"Fuck, Cap. _Fuck_." He's supposed to get himself and _Clint_ out. Tony kicks and yells and tries to buck his way free, yelling, "Get Barton. _Get Barton_ ," but it ends up muffled in star-spangled pectoral and Steve just pins him harder. Tony can feel him shudder as he's hit. Again. Everybody's getting shot today, except him, and that's a pattern that might be wiser to be grateful for rather than complain about, but at this rate, they're either going to get themselves killed or taken, and neither of those are good options.

Neither of those are acceptable options in any way at all. 

And if anything, Tony owes Clint _killed_ over _taken_. 

"Fuck. Get _off me_ , Cap."

Steve doesn't. But he does roll like a big, floppy bag of meat when Tony finally gets his heels dug into the dirt and enough leverage to _push_. 

As soon as Steve slides off him, all the sound goes unmuted. He hadn't even noticed it falling way, but now everything is a roar, with Natasha's voice yelling, "Cap?" close enough that the high note of tension in it is drowning everything else out.

"What--?" he yells back at her, meaning to ask _what happened?_ or maybe _what the hell is going on?_ but his throat closes on it. 

They're shielded behind Thor. Thor could have a new career as a ballistics barricade, considering how many times he's put himself between puny human bodies and gunfire today, but he can see Natasha's arm and maybe whole right side moving like a heavy, unwieldy thing. She's hit somewhere, then, but probably hit somewhere not immediately critical.

"They're backing off," Natasha says, cutting through the roar in his head. Her hand is on Steve's throat, feeling for a pulse. Moving in underwater slow motion. "You with me, Stark?"

"Twenty minutes," he manages, "We can't manage to not get killed for twenty minutes?"

There's another spatter of bullets. They're being taken down by goddamn _cover fire_. He can't tell if Steve is down for the moment, the count, or for good. Can't figure out half of what Natasha is saying, or where Clint is.

" _Fuck_." 

A howl of familiar rage rolls across the flatness of the lawn. Hulk's an uncontrolled force now. Even worse than down in the lab when he'd just about, almost, maybe was going to bite Tony's face off. 

Triggered by dead tigers. 

Clint. Clint. Where the hell--

His mouth is full of sour and the sick smell of Cap's blood and the disturbingly picturesque lawn is heaving like ocean swells. Just in the corner of his vision, there's a flash of tawny orange. It's like being rescued from robots and shark things and the other time the armor had given out on him. It's a stupid habit Clint's developing. Tony realizes it's him, at about the same time that he also realizes what Cap's tackle was for and that he's still not moving.

"Oh, hell. Steve?" 

Nat's eyes are on the sky. "He's alive," She says. Calm. Way more graceful at this fighting through injury and facing down fire thing and she doesn't look like she thinks Steve is at death's door, but his healing factor's probably not in top form after fixing him up once already. 

"Thor, we need to get him out of here." They also need Thor for cover. An extra Thor would be great, right around now. 

Something whistles, and both he and Natasha hunker down, instinctively making themselves flat while trying to cover Steve as whatever it is zips by. Being targeted from behind now. Tony's about yell at Natasha about it, when the whistle changes in pitch, dropping than rising again like it's put on brakes and is reversing.

Reversing. Fuck.

Tony pushes himself up, about to run, maybe to drag Steve, maybe to grab Nat. He's not entirely sure and there's no time to _be_ sure. There's only enough time to catch a glimpse of red and then to hit the ground as he's slammed in the chest.

"Nat--" He manages, gasping, but then something else hits his arm, his leg. Catches around his waist as he stumbles up in panic, and--

And it's suit pieces. It's fucking suit pieces, and Bruce's phone is going to be trapped against his thigh, but it doesn't matter. Even having panic-ditched his gun near Steve doesn't matter. He just need his helmet and faceplate and--

"I'm _beautiful_. Yes. _Yes_."

"No," comes over his comm. His _glorious, amazing_ JARVIS powered comm. " _I'm_ beautiful."

"Rhodey! You're--you can be beautiful after me. With me. I--"

"You're an ass. Don't ever try to leave me your building again."

Tony wiggles his fingers. The suit feels great. The repulsor hum in his palms feels even better. "I wasn't going to. I was going to ask you to go through a list of suitable tenant applicants."

"ETA one minute," Rhodes says. 

"The last time I was dead, JARVIS was very lonely," Tony goes on.

There's no reply. Natasha has two guns now, and is pretty successfully covering Steve, who's starting to show signs of life. Without Tony to add to the ranks of their vulnerably unarmored, Thor's able to move a little more freely, leaving Nat to go on brief forays to push back elk-things and it's a good thing he's had all that versus-Clint tiger wrestling practice, because the big game isn't gaining much of a foothold on him.

Clint's _way_ across the lawn. Tony's not sure how he's made it all that way without getting shot or eaten, but he's running and fighting like something wild and angry and injured. Nothing at all like the oversize housecat they've gotten used to. He's seen Clint fight as a tiger, but not like this. All spring and teeth and twisting spine, tail whipping out behind him when he digs in and changes direction.

Going after Suit Guy, goddammit.

A second later, Rhodey touches down with a dull thump. A gentler landing than Tony remembers him having.

"You're slower than suit pieces," Tony tells him, grinning behind his faceplate. 

"I'm bigger." Weapons come bristling out of Rhodey's shoulders. Tony's never been happier to see him. 

"Cap's down," he reports, scanning the field. "And Widow's hit. Hulk's hulking," that's hard to miss, "And one of us better go get Hawkeye before he bites someone too hard and commits accidental cannibalism."

"You get your chihuahua--"

"Chihuakita."

"--and I'll help Widow and the Captain."

The last half of that comes through his comm. He's already on it, blasting off--hell yes, powers of flight--and speeding across the lawn, closing on Clint, who's deep in a fray, rolling and wrestling and at least the tangle means no one has a clear shot at him.

"Clint!" 

Clint's not listening. Tony had thought he was on a vengeance mission, but maybe he's just been set off by Steve going down. By the volley of gunfire hitting the team. Clint maybe doesn't know that they're mostly all okay, and Steve okay enough to piece himself back together. 

He's streaked with blood and what might be animal spit or dew from the ground. Fur dark and damp. Ribs heaving. He looks more like something hunted than like a predator, but he's not taking opportunities to disengage either. Fighting without sense or tactics.

There's not much Clint in there.

Before Tony can decide if he should take out Suit Guy or grab Clint, Thor hits the ground in the middle of things, Mjolnir lashing out almost the instant his feet touch the ground. If anyone is qualified to break up a tiger fight, it's Thor, and even if Tony'd like to grab Clint and get his stupid ass out of dodge, his mass is enough to make flying awkward.

"Get Hawkeye. I'm getting some answers."

He leaves Thor to it. Picks up a bit of altitude to get over the last of the henchmen. Bullets ping off his suit, and it's great to be back to being armored and dangerous. And to be able to shoot energy out of his hands and not worry about his ammunition count. 

He grabs Suit Guy and swings, blasting his foot repulsors to send them both shooting skyward. Out of range of these jokers' lousy aim and where only bird forms could bother them.

Or try to. Even something as big as Clint’s' maybe-hawk-maybe-eagle isn't likely to be anything more than a nuisance.

"And it would be terrible," Tony says, "If I had to let go."

\-----

By the time he descends, there's other goons milling around, but they're SHIELD goons. The cavalry, there just in time to mop up and put band-aids on Steve and Natasha. 

"If Barton still wants to eat this guy," Tony says, setting down, and turning his prisoner over, "I'm not going to stand in his way." He's probably toxic to ingest. The more Tony thinks about what's been going on here, the more he wants to be rid of the guy. Just touching him feels dirty.

Steve looks like hell. Tired and pale and still sitting on the ground, with his arms resting on bent knees. Not even looking like he's thinking of getting up just yet. Apparently even Captain America has an upper limit of being-shot tolerance. 

Rhodey, on the other hand, just looks _pissed_. 

"Buddy," Tony starts.

"I'm not here." 

"Huh. Could have fooled me." 

"I got your suit out of the you-know-where. Good thing you had a spare in my size, because I could _not_ have used the you-know-which-one for this." The War Machine one controlled by the military, Tony could say, to hassle him, but Rhodey looks too serious. 

He goes with "Thanks," instead.

Steve swallows. Asks, "Clint?" 

"Thor's trying to stuff him into his jacket," Tony says, "He's okay." Then he corrects, "He's not hurt." 

Naked again, but that's starting to be a thing with Clint. At least when he gets back they'll have a blanket or something to toss over him. Even Bruce has real clothes, or real agent clothes, anyway. They're big on him, but anything beats the torn shirt they'd grabbed in the lab.

"Glad you had a back-up plan," Steve says, nodding at Rhodey, who snorts but doesn't say anything.

Tony shrugs. Pops his faceplate up. "Yeah. Well. Thanks for the cover. Please never do it, or anything like it, ever again."

Steve smiles. It looks kind of tight, and right. Steve's been on both sides of that self-sacrificing shit today. He's probably fighting back an urge to say something smooth and Cap-selfless like _no promises_ , and is probably only managing because of having been shielded by Clint playing the same game earlier.

"I'd like that," Steve says, trying for funny and coming out wry and tired. They really need to find him something to eat, but before Tony can suggest they stop off for burgers on the way back, Steve starts to haul himself up, then sits back down. 

"Steve?"

"I'm okay. Go help Thor."

Tony had forgotten that neither Thor nor Clint had a comm unit. Is a bit impressed that Steve still has a finger on who's incommunicado and might checking up on. "On it," he tells Cap. "See if SHIELD can get our jet back from the squatters, would you? Or sit there till someone can find you a granola bar. Whichever."

Steve waves him off, and with Nat down, Tony would stick by, at least till he regains the ability of an upright stance, but Rhodey's there to keep an eye out and fight back possible--literal--buzzards, if any are still loose. "I'll be right back," Tony says. "Don't get yourself shot for anyone while I'm gone."


	29. Chapter 29

Thor doesn't need help, or if he had, Tony'd missed the window. The field is full of SHIELD agents, bizarrely rounding up wildlife, and trying to figure out how to handle the injured. There's a small gaggle of agents gathered around the tiger Hulk had thrown, unsure how to proceed. Tony steers away, not wanting to know any more, in case it becomes something he'll have to keep from Bruce later. Thor, for his part, seems unbothered by the commotion and the weirdness of the commotion, strolling casually past it all with his hammer resting on his shoulder and the fingers of his free hand in the fur at Clint's shoulder. 

Clint's scruff fur is wet and spikey with blood and animal spit, a broad smear on his side that could mean a rabies shot in his near future. He's panting like racehorses Tony's seen, mouth open and tongue lolling. Or maybe more like dogs Tony's seen, flopped out on the beach back home and generally bedraggled with exhaustion and overheat.

They should go somewhere for the rest of the summer. Somewhere with seagulls for Clint to chase.

"So I think that went well," Tony says, setting down and letting Thor and Clint close the distance. "Good sticking to the plan there, Barton."

Clint butts him with his head, then brushes past, heading back to the point where he'd abandoned them to run off and wrestle moose on his own. He's dragging his feet as he slinks across the grass, with SHIELD agents giving him wary looks but letting him pass, mostly because of Thor's presence. Maybe because of Thor's presence and whatever beans Rhodey had spilled.

"I got the guy," Tony says, falling in next to them and flipping his faceplate up. "You know. Suit guy. Phone call guy. That guy."

Thor glances at him and nods minutely.

"I'm sorry if anyone wanted to eat him--and by anyone I mean Clint--but maybe SHIELD will let you get a bite in, if you promise to leave enough for questioning."

He gets a chuffing sound and a tail flick in response, and then Clint peels himself from Thor's side, padding away from them and across the lawn to spend half a minute bumping and prodding Steve before he flops onto the grass at his side and puts his head in Steve's lap, either protective or so SHIELD won't round him up with the others by accident. 

"I found them," Tony reports needlessly, when he gets back within earshot of Steve. "Barton and Junior of Asgard are fine."

"I noticed."

"Great. Where'd everyone else go?"

Steve shrugs, absently patting Clint's ears when Clint twitches them back menacingly and lifts a lip at anyone passing too close. "I don't know about Rhodes. I think Bruce went back to the jet."

Which means SHIELD's secured it, and that's nice because the last thing Tony wants is to go fight over one more thing. "And they left you here all by yourself? Geez, Steve."

"It's fine." He scratches Clint's head, then stops, like he'd forgotten and then suddenly remembered that the tiger's not _actually_ an animal. He pets the spot apologetically, even though Clint seems indifferent, too busy swiveling his ears around to track SHIELD agent proximity. "The faster they work, the faster we can get out of here."

"Staying out of the way, huh? Good plan. I'm gonna go grab my suit parts--" The ones that had been blasted with the EMP and left scattered in a sub-basement, "before someone decides to use them to build a child cyborg. Maybe by the time I get back someone will have put together a picnic, and then we can all nap in the sun."

"I was hoping we'd be home for lunch," Steve says, sounding tired, but offering a smile.

"I was hoping to go for burgers," Tony says, and turns to scan for Rhodey. "Keep an eye on them, Thor."

\-----

SHIELD clears the kids and the prisoners out, and Clint doesn't show up to hear the report or be debriefed, usefully hanging around Natasha's room in medical until she's released, even though SHIELD's pretty clearly in on the secret now, and no one's shown up to drag him back to a zoo. 

"So," Tony concludes, back in their own kitchen with Clint, "I think we should all officially calm down. And maybe introduce Rhodey to Francis the Tiger in a more positive setting, because I promised him it would be cool and then we made him fight wolves, look at freaky aliens, and I think some SHIELD kid might have accidentally taken him to look at a horror lab because they can't tell their Iron Mans apart. And maybe he can borrow Francis the Dog for walks, and we can get him set up with someone who'll add a homey touch to his apartment."

Clint gives him a dirty look. It's pleasantly familiar. 

"Or you can make me six hundred coffees," Tony offers. "Your choice."

"Me? How was this _my_ fault?" Clint demands.

"Because you never changed your name. You call yourself a secret agent and then you run around signing checks and making library cards with the same name you put on your goddamn algebra homework."

Clint frowns. Then his eyes get narrow.

"Oh, what? Of _course_ I checked. You _know_ I checked."

"You checked on my homework?"

"Progress reports. Maybe welfare reports. Someone digitized a database. Your math didn't entirely suck. I was very impressed."

"I'm a _pilot_ , of course my math doesn't suck."

"That first part is debatable, Flapabout. Me and Thor are witnesses."

Clint scowls, tracking Tony with an unhappy, angry look, like he can't quite put his annoyance to a concrete objection. If he was the tiger, he'd be bristling. Tony grins, then decides to try for contrite, then decides Clint's not buying any of it and lets the whole act drop.

"I nose. I'm nosey Sue me," he shrugs. "On the other hand, nosing helped us get Steve back. And on the _other_ , other hand, you're probably fine being Clint Barton from here on out, so I propose we toast to that, and then refuse to listen to anything SHIELD wants to tell us about aliens."

That gets Clint's attention. "What do they want to tell us about aliens?"

He's off plan already. Tony sighs and leans against a counter. Gestures. "This is what happens when you don't come to the debrief, Barton."

"I didn't think anyone would appreciate it if I sat through half of it with my eyes shut and my fingers in my ears," Clint admits, unusually up-front. 

"Well. Good call then. Bruce had scary stories." About Jar Thing and the plan he and Tony had pieced together in the lab hallway, involving the kids, and the tiger he'd thought was Clint, and the alien shifter army Sphinx might have been trying to manufacture if they could work out how to identify shifters young enough, or maybe create them. Something in that ballpark, and potentially involving military related contracts from who knew how far back. "SHIELD's locked both sites down, and are hunting for offshoots. They're looking for anyone else who might have survived that fire. Do you want details? You don't have to have details."

"Maybe on a need to know basis. Otherwise, pass."

"Fine. You don't need to know. Steve says shoot, you shoot, from now on that's our whole plan."

"My plan was fine," Clint objects, huffy.

"Your plan was horrific and involved you and Steve getting shot _before_ it involved getting Steve and Natasha shot."

"It was fine."

"You're insane. We were supposed to be _rescuing_ Steve."

"We rescued him. It was fine."

Clint looks stubborn. It's the exact right time to tell him, "Steve thinks your lion's in bad shape, but SHIELD thinks they can fix it so you don't drop dead in five minutes the next time you try to shift it, if you're up for some cutting edge veterinary care."

Clint freezes. That's in the not-awful to good range of reactions, so Tony goes ahead with, "Thor offered to stay for the whole thing so you don't panic and maul anybody, and I, for one, would really appreciate it if we all got to see him in a surgical gown and one of those little blue shower cap things. Think about it. No pressure." Then he adds, "And no robot eye. I asked."

"Good to know."

"But stop using it as a throw away. It's messed up, and if you do it again, I'm going to have to adopt fifty shelter cats just to even things out."

That gets him a sullen slouch and a hilarious pouting expression. It's amazing that Clint's sitting here and letting Tony blow steam at him, instead of storming off, sulking for two days, then coming to the lab in his cutest possible form to solicit admiration and sleep in Tony's mail.

"Steve's putting the kibosh on any ideas SHIELD might have to apply military application to you," Tony adds, even though that might count as details Clint doesn't need or want to know. "In case that makes you feel better about anything. I still think you should let me and Bruce try to build you fox pants, though." Or some kind of tiny canine unit tac vest. Anything so that Clint's ridiculous escape maneuvers didn't also leave him completely unequipped on a battlefield. "We can put pink and white stars on it so you'll match Natasha's ping-pong ball."

Clint doesn't grin, but the corner of his mouth twitches a little. Then he says, "My math, huh?"

"Well. It's nothing to write MIT about. Don't get a fat head just because I said you weren't abysmal at multiple choice."

Tony's not sure if Clint's about to laugh or get angry. His face goes through a series of noncommittal micro expressions, just a tensing at the eyes or in his cheek, before he changes his mind and starts to have a different reaction. "Are you having a seizure?" Tony asks. 

Clint shakes his head, another uncertain gesture. It doesn't seem to be in reaction to Tony.

"Clint?"

"Shit," Clint says, and puts both hands over his face, before he makes a sound that is either a laugh, or the sound of him finally cracking.

"Barton, you're freaking me out, and I've filled my absolute quota of freak-out for at least the next month."

"Explain the--" Clint pulls a hand away from his face long enough to wave it at Tony, prompting him. "The math thing."

Tony's not sure if he should get someone. Maybe get JARVIS to get someone. "Fine. The hypotenuse is the square root of--"

This time Clint does react, picking his head up to look at Tony in irritation, but also with a weird kind of pleased look, like he's happy about something and impatient for Tony to catch on. He also looks a little glassy eyed.

"You're seriously starting to scare me, Hawkeye."

"It wasn't Barney," Clint says. "I mean, he's probably still got a get-rich scheme in action somewhere, but this wasn't him. I thought--"

"Oh, geez."

"I mean, he probably knows I'm an Avenger."

"Probably," Tony allows. "Clint--"

Clint grins, then scrubs a hand across his eyes real fast, like he thinks Tony will miss it if he does it quickly enough. "Maybe he did think he was scoring me a cushy gig," Clint says, and laughs. "He was just fourteen or something." He ducks his head, then admits. "And Barney's always been kind of a dumbass."

It's not implausible and if Clint wants to tell himself that, it's not like it will do any harm, now that he's not in hiding. Or at least, it won't do kidnap and capture harm. "We can find him and ask him if you want," Tony says. "Roughing up optional." And maybe dependent on what answers they get. "Sleep on it. And now, I want to go watch Natasha try to type a report with one arm in a sling, and I better go before I miss it. Coming?"

It takes Clint a second to switch gears, and then to blink the emotion back out of his face and finally to crack a smile and say, "Yeah. Sure." It's not the most convincing smile Tony's ever seen, but it's not the worst attempt either, considering the week Clint's had.

"Great. I won't let her tell you any creepy details. Just let me grab us some beers, and then we'll go offer her our kind assistance. If it goes bad, split up and reconvene at midnight in the lab."

Clint laughs at the idea, but when they get to Natasha's, he makes himself big and at home on her couch, resting his chin on the armrest to watch her hunt and peck one-handed while Tony goes to snoop in her fridge.

Someday, maybe, they'll be able to convince Clint to try flying for non last resort reasons, maybe at some country property where he won't get blown away by any half-decent gust of wind, the way he probably would off the tower roof. In the meantime, Tony stashes his beer in the fridge, and brings one back with him to the couch, where he shoves Clint until he makes room, laying his big striped head against Tony as soon as he's settled. Peaceful like someone's oversize dog.

_I have the castle and your tiger_ , he sends to Natasha, mostly so she'll have to deal with pop-up text boxes on top of everything. _What are you going to do about it?_

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Banner for harcourt's Genus Panthera](https://archiveofourown.org/works/603093) by [Neffie (originalneffie)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/originalneffie/pseuds/Neffie)




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